The National Youth Service bill, 2018 was yesterday approved by the cabinet at the National Assembly. The memorandum from the Ministry of Youth and Public Service seeks to align the NYS with the Big 4 agenda and Vision 2030 development blueprint.
Apparently the bill contains a raft of measures aimed at strengthening the operations and management of the NYS, among them transforming the department into a body corporate.
NYS is almost the mother of all misappropriation of funds scandals in Kenya by the government.In September 2015, Kenya’s director of public prosecutions asked Waiguru to record a statement over the disappearance of Ksh. 791 million from the ministry of Devolution and Planning. Public Accounts Committee chairman Nicholas Gumbo said he was looking into the ministry’s accounts in which the ministry had bought overpriced items including condom dispensers for $250; a television set worth Ksh. 1.7 million ($17,000) and sex toys. Waiguru denied these allegations on her Facebook page saying that she is not involved in the purchase of anything for the ministry.
The saga grew into a 9 billion scandal which saw 54 suspects in the NYS corruption arraigned before Chief Magistrate Douglas Ogoti at Milimani Law Courts to take pleas in a lengthy court session that dragged into the night. The intrigues of the charges saw anti-corruption Chief Magistrate Ogoti sitting late into the night after he declined to adjourn the matter on that day.
The proposed law aims to fix the weaknesses in the NYS structure that hinder its work. They include loopholes in the governance and monitoring aspects exploited by corrupt officers.
The meeting was chaired by President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House, Nairobi, and attended by DP William Ruto. It also approved guidelines for implementation of the affordable housing programme, a key plank of the Big 4 Agenda.
The Cabinet was also briefed by the Education ministry on the level of preparedness by relevant agencies for the upcoming national exams — KCPE and KCSE. Candidates with special needs will be provided with adapted examination materials such large print exam papers for the partially blind and brailed exam papers for the totally blind.
Also was endorsed the establishment of the Kenya Export Promotion and Branding Agency (KEPROBA) by merging the Export Promotion Council and the Brand Kenya Board. This is in line with an earlier presidential directive on the objective of the integrated National Exports Development and Promotion Strategy launched mid this year to grow exports at an average rate of 25 per cent annually.
The Cabinet approved a memorandum by the Treasury for the setting up of a framework for issuance of government support measures.The framework will also establish a clear and predictable process for the management of financial risks and liabilities in government projects while improving confidence in decision-making and eliminating ambiguity.
The new measures will promote the use of private-public partnerships as the preferred approach in the financing and delivery of projects. This will go a long way in the implementation of key projects off-budget in line with the President’s recent pronouncements.
A while back in a statement on embezzlement scandals, the NASA principal Musalia Mudavadi pointed out that lack of a fully constituted Ombudsman office to oversight government expenditure in real-time was providing an avenue for looting.
He said there already exists the Public Officers Ethics Act on misappropriation of public property which the government can easily use to firmly punish the culprits – but it just does not want to.”It simply is complicit and therefore lacks will confront the menace.”
“We need new stiffer preventive laws to buttress Chapter 12 and 13 on principals of public finance so that public officers are truly bound to the Constitution to uphold the efficient use of public resources and be individually accountable for their actions,” he said.