EXCLUSIVE REPORT BY WANJOHI NDERITU
Nyahururu councillors have “sat” on the Town Clerk to the extent that they have been allocating duties to the staff and employing casuals, answerable to them, to even collect revenue, The Home News can authoritatively report.With the staff divided into groupings that owe their royalty to different councillors instead of assisting their chief officers to implement service delivery, and the council divided among competing procurement interests of the councillors, workers - who have no clear job descriptions and reporting chain of command - and the officers, the situation at the Town Hall is, sadly, no better than that in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
As a result, constant head-on collisions of policy formulation - which is the work of the councillors - and implementation of the policies, which is supposed to be in the docket of the chief officers, and lack of working governance structure including lack of specified duties and responsibilities for staff, and general indiscipline and insubordination by the staff and the councillors, may bring the council on its knees any time unless interventions are done immediately.
The identities of the more than 100 casuals, including their personal data could not be obtained, neither was it clear to who they surrender their daily collections from parking charges and market fees.
The damning revelations come amid confirmed reports that the council workers had not been paid last month’s salaries by Friday, August 19. They also emerge as a section of prominent business people and stakeholders wrote to the Ministers of Local Government and Lands and Settlement, calling for investigations into what they termed as unplanned or poorly planned, illegal permanent structures that have turned some parts of the fast growing cosmopolitan into a ‘concrete jungle’. The matter was exclusively reported by The Home News in the previous issue.
Impeccable sources close to a team sent to audit the council by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Ministry of Local Government, Nairobi, confided with The Home News that the team’s findings had been communicated to the Town Clerk, Misheck Kimani, who, it is believed, must have briefed the Finance, Staff and General Purposes committee of the council. The Town Clerk was also instructed to ensure a smooth running of the council.
The Home News was not immediately able to establish whether Kimani had complied with the directives. When The Home News sought to get a comment from him, he was said to have travelled to Nairobi to organize for travel documents for himself, his deputy Mercy Wahome, former powerful mayor Muritu Karumba - who is said to exert immense influence in the running of the council in addition to playing god-father to some councillors, especially after the recent mayoral elections where Timothy Nduhiu replaced Peter Thiari, during whose tenure performance contract at the council was said to have been high - for a trip to Finland. They will also be accompanied by another staffer, Mr. Kihanda.
Whereas the return air ticket and expenses for the educational trip are fully paid by the Finnish government, the council is obliged to give the travelling group per diem for all the 10 or so days they will be out of the country.
Our sources also said that the construction of permanent stalls at the main bus park was among the issues touched by the auditors.
The auditors were said to have wondered why the council had altered the original plan of the stalls project as designed by the engineer. They also wanted an explanation whether the additional kiosks were part of the initial project costing, and why the civic leaders had changed the cause of the project from one being implemented by the council to one of their own.
According to the sources, the procurement of the building materials for the kiosks had not been competitively sourced. The records of contributions by the stakeholders (said to have been Sh 36,000 each) were suspicious The money was supposed to be “rent in advance”
An officer (name withheld by The Home News) was said to have cancelled a valid and running contract of constructing the stalls without involvement of the Town Clerk, leading to the council being sued. The auditors were said to have queried on whose authority the officer had cancelled the contract.
The Home News reliably learned that the controversial project had been started in 2009 in a bid to upgrade the bus park, with a nice plan by the Town Engineer. The traders who were occupying the temporary structures were to be given first priority in occupying the permanent ones. However, the original plan was secretly altered by a junior under the surveillance of some councillors who allegedly allocated themselves the additional ones.
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