President Uhuru Kenyatta asks African legislators to fight illicit financial flows

President Uhuru Kenyatta

NAIROBI: President Uhuru Kenyatta has asked African parliamentarians to help stop illicit financial flows by fighting corruption in their respective countries.

The President also challenged members of Public Accounts Committees (PACs) to foster transparency to ensure prudent use of public resources.

He was speaking yesterday at a Nairobi hotel when he opened the second Annual General Meeting of the African Organisation of Public Accounts Committees (AFROPA).

“The theme of this conference: Curbing Illicit Financial Flows in Africa is also timely, coming as it does, in an age where our people are increasingly intolerant—and rightly so—-of the historic corruption that has too often crippled their countries and their continent,” the president said.

The president also expressed the need for PACs to come up with legal mechanisms to ensure public officers are accountable to citizens. He urged members of the committees, who are all parliamentarians, to rise above partisan considerations while discharging their duties.

In his speech, the President also signalled concern over the accountability of foreign financial aid and donations and the relationship between PACs and Supreme Audit Institutions.

The Head of State was speaking shortly after the office of the Auditor General released a report that painted a grim picture of Kenya’s lack of accountability.

The Auditor General’s report noted that out of the Sh1.22 trillion total expenditure for the 2014-15 financial year, just Sh12.8 billion, or 1.05 per cent was incurred lawfully.

The report says a massive 61.8 per cent of expenditure was unlawfully accounted for while 30.5 per cent was either misleading or incomplete.

The auditor could not even confirm whether Sh80.8 billion was incurred properly or not. On foreign financial aid and donations, the Head of State said PACs should provide an effective process of public financial accountability, a strong tool of quality financial governance that would ensure proper utilisation of aid resources.

He noted that there has always been an issue of whether foreign governments and development partners would trust domestic accountability mechanisms and provide support for the strengthening of local institutions charged with the responsibility or not.

“You all appreciate that in cases where development partners demand compliance with separate, ‘external’ accountability processes, there is a risk that the requirements of the foreign governments and partners may usurp domestic accountability processes,” said President Kenyatta.

On the relationship between PACs and the Supreme Audit Institutions, President Kenyatta called for the strengthening of the mechanisms of interaction, which have a strong bearing on accountability issues.

“As members of Public Accounts Committees on the continent, your work is to mediate that change by fostering transparency among public agencies and in the use of public resources,” Uhuru said.