Wamuzi News Ke
The Auditor-General has made a shocking announcement that has thrown new suspicions about the effectiveness of Kenya’s parliamentary oversight mechanisms.
This announcement reveals that two out of 63 performance audits submitted over the years have been done by the Members of Parliament (MPs).
The disclosure exposes the legislative scrutiny of government operations deeply, and thus accountability, public expenditure, and oversight failures that could have been developing over decades in the case of national policy and service delivery are already there.
The disclosure was made during a ministerial briefing in Parliament where the Auditor-General was talking about the audit engagement by the lawmakers.
The office informed that while hundreds of audit reports—among these being those on financial propriety, results, and performance of public programs—were prepared and submitted for parliamentary action, none to almost no report was substantively discussed in the legislative chamber.
This institutional inertia that has been going on for more than a decade is now raising worries about governance being too easy and the executive always having power. Performance audits are vital to the democratic accountability process.
They determine the results, the standards adhered to, and the efficiency and the ethics of public resources’ use among the government agencies and programs.
However, the Auditor-General’s report suggests that only two of these important audits have been examined in depth by MPs, which means there is a massive erosion of parliamentary duty. The effects of this gap in oversight are enormous.
Just in the last ten years, hundreds of billions of shillings in public funds have gone through ministries, state corporations, counties, and other public institutions—all without any major parliamentary questioning about the effectiveness of that expenditure.
Basically, Kenyan taxpayers have to support public services while there is no guarantee that their members of parliament would have checked on the value or the real benefits of those services. Governance monitors and opposition heads expressed their horror and disbelief, calling this event “a national emergency of accountability.”
A number of civil society organizations have already made their positions public and are demanding that Parliament undertake reforms immediately and are arguing that the legislature’s inaction on performance audits has weakened one of the constitutional mandates and has tarnished the public’s trust in the government.
“It is a crisis of oversight that is systemic, and we have to be very careful here,” was the reaction of a high-profile governance expert who was assessing the Auditor-General’s report.
“The whole purpose of performance audits is to bring to the surface and identify inefficiencies, risks of corruption, and misuse of authority. If the Legislature does not respond to them, it is in fact legitimizing and even promoting waste and mismanagement.”
The critics maintain that non-participation of parliament allows not only wasting money but also making the measures against corruption and poor service delivery weaker, especially at a time when the public is demanding more transparency due to economic pressures.
Besides, the Auditor-General’s office pointed out that the lack of follow-up actions by the legislature makes the deterrent effect of performance audits much less potent.
If the government departments are going to be evaluated and at the same time they know that there will be no further examination or action on such evaluations, then the motivation to meet the standards of finance and operations will be low.
The lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum have given a mixed response to the announcement. Some of them admitted that there was a need for corrective measures and promised to create special parliamentary committees that would handle audit discussions quickly and also secure the implementation of audit recommendations.
Nonetheless, the others did not stand idle and instead placed the blame on limited resources, prioritizing other legislative issues, and backlogs in procedures for the neglect of auditing.
To illustrate the situation, the very fact that 61 out of 63 performance audits have not been talked about in parliament is already a major point in the national conversation.
It is believed by the experts that the disclosure might lead to the reforms in the legislature, public pressure campaigns, and the demands for a law that would set a binding time frame for the parliamentary review of audits, all at once.
