President Uhuru Kenyatta should be commended for giving government officials seven days to explain how they spent over Sh300 billion the Auditor General says is unaccounted for in the 2011/2012 financial year. We hope the reports will be made public and appropriate sanctions imposed on those who fail to offer satisfactory explanations.
Although it would be over-reaching to expect President Kenyatta to take the same route recently taken by Malawi President Joyce Banda, who sacked her whole cabinet following accusations of massive corruption, it may not be too much to hope that the individuals found to have enriched themselves would be sacked, prosecuted and their ill-gotten wealth seized. Kenyans have waited a long time to see action against looters of public coffers to accept anything less than that.
One area the AG zeroed in on that demands particular attention is the irregular disbursement of Sh149 million, ostensibly to foreign pensioners from the Consolidated Fund. Every self-respecting auditor knows failure to balance a particular ledger because of a small inexplicable amount is often a pointer to a grand fraud.
It would, therefore, not be surprising if a careful audit of the Consolidated Fund, with particular emphasis on the payments made to service foreign debts, reveals massive losses that are covered up year in year out.
There is consensus among those familiar with how Treasury operates, for example, that the country continued to pay foreign loans owed to Yugoslavia – and other former East European countries – long after the formerly Communist country broke up into smaller units. A forensic audit of these accounts would reveal who benefitted from these payments for it certainly was not the Yugoslav people.
There is also reason to believe that Treasury continues to pay other bilateral and multi-lateral countries long after the loans have been repaid. All this points to a need to appoint a respected internal auditor, preferably a foreign one for obvious reasons, to go through Treasury and Central Bank of Kenya books with a fine tooth-comb.
The exercise should, ideally, be extended to other ministries and followed up by bringing to book all the people found culpable whether in office or retired. That is the only way the new technocrats recently appointed to run ministries can be given a clean slate.
