Parliamentary committees lack capacity to investigate

In the wake of massive corruption in the grand coalition government and the debate on appointment of new electoral commissioners, parliamentary committees have once again "woken up" to help "unravel" the scams and re-energise electoral reforms.

The Parliamentary Accounts Committee led by Ikolomani MP Dr Bonnie Khalwale was said to have attempted to gather the "paper trail" to expose the alleged wrong doing at NCPB and Ministry of Agriculture with regard to the maize scandal. John Mututho of the Agriculture Committee too attempted to present the teams report and views in parliament yet the committee had not finalised its work.

Some members’ rose to protest that Khalwale had not consulted committee members while Mututho had no authority to speak on behalf of his committee since it had not reached common position over the matter.

Over the years PIC and PAC have been seen to hold numerous press conferences mostly claiming they were investigating corruption or other social ills only for those "efforts" to come to naught.

Remember PAC under Uhuru Kenyatta travelled to London to "collect evidence" of the Anglo Leasing scam from exiled anti-corruption PS John Githongo. After spending weeks in London hotels the team came and complied a report, which neither brought any new information nor stirred action from parliament or other relevant institutions.

For such bodies to purport to investigate corruption and other crimes is pretentious and deception of the highest order.

First, they lack technical skills to piece together evidence most in the form loads of paper and forensic audit. Remember most of those fellows have no patience to sit for hours going through boring documents. To make matter worse, transactions in the modern economy are done through ICT tools and systems which most of the good old fellows have no idea about. If they hire experts to do the job on their behalf, they would be accused of usurping the powers of the executive.

Parliamentary committees therefore are towers of incompetence. Do you remember the Gor Sungu committee that wanted to unravel the murder of Robert Ouko? The chairman ranted and intimidated witnesses. His most memorable quote, "are you threatening me," made Nicholas Biwott gain public sympathy.

Recently another farcical committee wanted to investigate whether Alvaro drink manufactured by East African Breweries was alcoholic.

They held several meetings in hotels and made an extensive tour of the plant "to familiarise" themselves with the Alvaro production process.

Was that relevant? All they needed was to take a sample to a government chemist or better still a form four class at a provincial school would comfortably have given them results after a chemistry lesson in the lab!

But as usual the cow had to be milked in the form of Sh5,000 per MP for every sitting in allowance and other benefits.

The other tragedy with our system is distaste for transparency. Parliamentary committees should be opened for the public to attend and the media to cover the proceedings after all the matters are of public interest and funded by the public through taxes.

No wonder then that most committees make a lot of noise after "compiling" their reports because as the adage goes, empty debes make the most noise.