Matiangi who spoke as a guest speaker at the National Assembly Leadership retreat in Mombasa says bureaucracy over the years has acted as a hideout for incompetent individuals and as a great source of theft of public resources/CFM NEWS
Mombasa, Kenya Apr 26 – Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi has challenged MPs to eliminate bureaucratic systems of doing government business in a bid to prevent wastage of public resources.
Matiangi who spoke as a guest speaker at the National Assembly Leadership retreat in Mombasa says bureaucracy over the years has acted as a hideout for incompetent individuals and as a great source of theft of public resources.
He told the top leadership of the House and all the Chairpersons of the parliamentary committees present that some lawmakers had resorted to engaging in some shoddy government businesses under the disguise of being ‘bureaucratic’.
He pinpointed out scenarios where some MPs lied about the progress of projects in their respective constituencies so as to influence the flow of cash to their regions which would in turn facilitate their completion yet in reality nothing was happening on the ground.
Once allocated the funds, this, he said would force the MPs to play cat and mouse games with relevant government agencies when asked to provide some documents detailing the progress of the projects.
“Some of the reports my office receive are in total contradiction to what some of the MPs tell me. I have reports which say that some road projects in some regions are complete but when in actual sense the relevant government agencies go to inspect they find out that the projects have either stalled or their was no work their all,” he said.
Speaking in his capacity as the coordinator of government projects, he noted that differential of information from government agencies has been a major challenge in actualizing key projects across the country.
“Some of the challenges we are facing as a country is because of poor coordination and lack of proper inter-governmental relationships,” he said.
He noted that part of the reason why President Uhuru Kenyatta formed a coordination framework is to allow the ease of government institutions to freely share communication with one another in a more effective way.
He stressed on the need for government institutions who occupy the same buildings for instance to do away with sending emails or letters and rather embrace the face to face communication mode which he said would erode the delay instances where a program takes years to take off or fail to take off in totality.
“Ministers can meet over a cup of tea and talk about issues instead of writing unnecessary letters which take forever to be responded to,” he said.
He at the same time asked the Leadership of the National Assembly to fast track the passage of key pending Bills that are crucial for the implementation of the big four agenda insisting that the Executive was keen to have them passed.
Leaders present in the summit included: House Speaker Justin Muturi, his deputy Moses Cheboi, Majority and Minority Leaders Aden Duale and John Mbadi respectively among other host of leaders.
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