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Nandi Governor Stephen Sang faces EACC probe over Sh17mn expenditure on ECD centres

Governor Stephen Sang who appeared before the committee failed to provide financial documents to the Auditor General to account for the money/NANDI COUNTY PRESS

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 21 – Senate watchdog committee has recommended the probe into a Sh17 million expenditure earmarked for the construction of 60 Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres in Nandi County under the 2017/2018 Financial Year.

The Public Accounts and Investments Committee on Wednesday asked the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) to investigate how Sh17 million meant for the construction of the ECD centres was utilized.

Governor Stephen Sang who appeared before the committee failed to provide financial documents to the Auditor General to account for the money.

Committee members led by Kirinyaga Senator Charles Kibiru who chaired the proceedings said failure by the county administration to provide proper financials records raised suspicious over the utilization of the funds.

“What is done is done and we can comfortably confirm that Governor you did not comply with the law in your work. There is no justification as to why you did not provide those documents to show how far the construction was. In our report, I can assure you that we will invite the EACC to investigate this matter,” Kibiru said.

His sentiments were supported by other committee members led by Kisii Senator Sam Ongeri who felt there was laxity in Nandi county as far as record keeping is concerned.

“At the leadership level, there must a competence officer who is able to verify the standards that you have set for those ECD classes. They should also be able to account and keep records of every shilling that has been used but you cannot come here and tell us over 17 million was set out for a project but no documents to show that indeed the money was used for the right reasons. It does not make sense,” Ongeri expressed.

Isiolo Women Representative Fatuma Dullo said failure to keep financial records for projects may imply that a county is using diverting money to other projects.

Although the Financial Year 2017/2018 which is under review ended on June 30 last year, Governor Sang defended his administration saying the delay was caused by human resource challenges in the county.

“Our idea is to build over sixty ECDs and we identified needy schools, so we ended up choosing some of the schools which were far away in our various wards. This decision came with its challenges because although our plan is to build ECDs, the infrastructure leading to those schools are terrible, we decided to deal with that first and other had no water sources,” Sang said.

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“Therefore, the documents are not available because no ECD class has fully been completed and once we have the certificates of 100 percent completion we shall provide.”

Sang was answering queries raised by Auditor General Edward Ouko for 2017/ 2018 Financial Year.

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