Nyamira County Executive was behind shutting down of a corruption report that was tabled on Wednesday by the Public Accounts and Investment Committee, Magombo MCA has claimed.
The report, which had implicated senior county officials of massive graft and recommended them to be sacked, was voted against by majority of the members on grounds that it ‘lacked credible’ evidence on the alleged corruption.
Mr Ezra Mochiemo, who also chairs the committee on Thursday, accused the executive of using ‘executive powers’ to compromise his colleagues over the report.
“The five-member committee did great work and we even went out to table a number of flaws in terms of expenditure by certain departments but it’s really sad that it cannot be adopted due to mere politics,” Mochiemo said.
“The county leadership used executive powers to compromise some of my colleagues. Till Tuesday, the mood of the house was indicating that many MCAs were in support of the report only to change their stand in final minutes,” Mochiemo added.
He blamed the executive for allegedly dividing the MCAs along their region of representation and warned of economic turmoil in the county if an action is not taken to weep out corruption.
“As PAC, we work transparently without fear or favor but it’s unfortunate that some MCAs could be incited along clans and regions they come from. If we work to protect corruption, then our county will face severe economic challenges,” he said.
“The executive should desist from dividing MCAs with an aim of protecting corrupt individuals,” he added. Personally I thought we would win by at least 20 votes out of 33 MCAs but 21 MCAs voted against the report because they were compromised to protect some corrupt people,” he added.
Among those who were implicated included Kepha Osoro (Environment and Natural Resources) and Peter Omwanza who heads the Youth and Gender docket but County Secretary Erick Onchana has since dismissed the allegations as ‘basless’ and challenged PAC to desist from dragging county leadership in corruption related matters.
“It’s laughable that PAC is blaming us on the outcome of the motion. That is a baseless argument and the committee should desist from dragging executive to its woes,” he told the reporter.