Public Accounts Committee (PAC) may call more NYS witnesses

The National Assembly Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will convene on Tuesday to determine if they will invite more witnesses, including Farouk Kibet, an aide of Deputy President William Ruto, over the National Youth Service (NYS) scandal.

Committee chairman Nicholas Gumbo said former Devolution Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru should have been the last witness, but there was a “lot more work”.

“From the observation of the committee, this thing is very big and we may have to invite more witnesses,” Gumbo said yesterday.

He said several names had been mentioned in the course of the investigation, and PAC will decide based on the evidence provided on which additional witnesses to be summoned.

“It is not possible to call everyone as that might take us on a wild goose chase,” he said in a phone interview, a day after his committee hosted its most important witness in Ms Waiguru.

The committee will compile a report after hearing from the new witnesses and it could censure indicted individuals and recommend their prosecution, among other possible outcomes.

Some of the witnesses who have already appeared before the committee could be recalled to give further information on allegations raised after their initial appearance.

At the end of Thursday grilling of Waiguru, the only issue clear was that more than Sh1.6 billion had been paid out of the NYS to firms owned by key suspect Josephine Kabura.

It is also feared that a lot more money may have been stolen from other programmes of the Department of Planning, which was among the single largest beneficiaries of the highly divisive Sh250 billion Eurobond.

There was also consensus that Ms Kabura was not her own person in the looting executed through a complex scheme that manipulated the government payments system known as IFMIS through fake procurement documents.

Payments received by Kabura’s companies were promptly withdrawn and passed on to other witnesses, including Benson Gethi, who is believed to be the master schemer or closest link to the real perpetrators who remain faceless.

MPs had hoped to push Waiguru to reveal identities of people she believed were the actual beneficiaries of the looting from the project intended to tackle youth unemployment and a wide skill gap.

It would come as an anti-climax when after eight hours of questioning, she vaguely pointed at powerful people in a cartel involving Gethi and Kibet.

“She is a puppet of this cartel of Gethi and his operatives who are powerful individuals,” Waiguru said of her main accuser, Kabura, who earlier in the year swore an affidavit that seemed to incriminate the former CS.

Kabura had two days earlier flatly refused to answer any questions from her sworn affidavit, only referring the MPs to an ongoing court case where she is charged as a suspect in the fraud.

Waiguru blamed everyone else in her ministry, except her controversial appointee to the position of senior deputy director general of NYS, Adan Harakhe.

On several instances, she was put on her defence for seemingly protecting Harakhe in whose tenure as the officer in charge of finance, procurement and administration departments, Sh400 million was irregularly paid out.

Waiguru was also hard-pressed to justify the Sh3.5 billion in additional funds she requested on behalf of the NYS at the end of the 2014/15 financial year — a portion of which got stolen.

Her former Permanent Secretary Peter Mangiti had accused her of abetting the theft by running the NYS from her office, including the selection and installation of Mr Harakhe — whose academic qualifications are reported to be dubious.

Mangiti told the committee that he was directed to sign the Harakhe’s appointment letter, even though the position did not exist and a request for its creation had been turned down by the Public Service Commission.

Waiguru, however, blamed the theft on Mangiti as the overall accounting officer, who should have ensured that the authority to transact was taken from NYS Director General Nelson Githinji after her directive.

As it would turn out, Harakhe claimed his password was stolen to execute the fraudulent transactions.