MAKALI MULU: Too many confidential votes should worry Kenyans

Kenyans have a reason to be worried after the revelations by the Auditor General that there are such a high number of confidential votes, considering the votes or accounts are not so much open to audit yet are allocated billions of shillings.

More worrying is that some agencies have been allocated those budgets yet have no role for what confidential votes are primarily meant for.

Confidential votes are for security, not general purposes.

What has a confidential vote to do with mining, for instance, or even the Judiciary? We have a reason to worry because so much money is involved in these kitties.

We are talking about hundreds of millions of shillings, if not billions.

Unscrupulous officers could be hiding behind the protection given to these funds to misuse them.

This necessitates an urgent re-look into the gaps that have limited the accountability of these funds.

Like it happens in other jurisdictions, and borrowing from international best practices, we need to devise a way of vetting MPs who can check the details of this spending and report to Parliament, even if it’s in camera.

It would be prudent for Parliament to oversight the secret kitties, especially now that the country’s fiscal space is highly constrained.

We can have two members of the Committee on Internal Security and National Administration granted access to the votes for scrutiny, after which they can brief other members.

The best practice outside Kenya is that a few legislators are vetted by the intelligence to access details of the votes.

There must be a way for Kenyans to get value for money that is credited to the confidential accounts without jeopardising the essence of confidentiality.

Time has come to push for members of the Security Committee and maybe the Budget Committee to be vetted and allowed access to the budgets for audit.

It is also time we backed reforms to the law to give the auditor general the latitude needed to review these accounts.

Kitui Central MP and Budget committee member spoke to Star