Enough is enough but not for the greedy souls who you might have it all only to discover their crooked schemes for gathering more still for selfish ambitions.
Governors have been funding a secret account operated at their Council of Governors headquarters to hire choppers that have seen some adopt the lives of kings.
To beat the stringent procurement rules that would have exposed them, the county bosses remit excess money to the Council of Governors (CoG), part of which is channelled towards paying for choppers and funding other excesses.
out of the Sh250 million that has been under the microscope of auditors and investigators, at least Sh150 million was used to hire choppers.
This is what has enabled the county bosses to crisscross the country like kings in choppers paid for by the taxpayer but shielded from accounting.
At the CoG, which is funded by the taxpayer, the chairman is the only one with the privilege of using choppers while on official duties.
The chairman has to log in every trip as official to legally get a chopper at the doorstep. But governors who also wanted to enjoy the privilege decided to make extra contributions on top of the amount required from them and the difference is wired to the operational account from where they hire choppers.
However, governors have been using choppers but the payments cannot be tracked back to their counties,” a source familiar with the operations said.
But another source within CoG said the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission (EACC) has been investigating the scam and interrogated officers and this has scared the council from commenting before the report is released.
It is not yet clear why the EACC has taken too long to conclude the investigations which should have been a straight forward affair. “An internal auditor who raised the matter was fired and some of the external ones as well as the EACC officers were compromised,” the source said.
By the end of 2017, the CoG had at least four special accounts which were not on the radar on the Auditor General.
About nine governors mostly use the services while the others use them on the cover of “doing council of governors work.” “Such a thing cannot happen unless staff from either finance, procurement or administration are aware,” the source said.
One of the staff who standard would not name for legal reasons has been an employee at the institution since it was founded in 2014. More money also comes from counties as inter-governmental fees. It is channeled to one of the special purpose accounts.
Inter-governmental fees is Sh3 million per county per quarter.
Mr Ouko has raised queries on books of various devolved units on their decisions to send the CoG millions of shillings despite being funded by the exchequer. The CoG receives about Sh350 million every year.
Why do you think the internal auditor and some of the external ones were fired?