CORD: We have put Jubilee leaders on their toes

CORD co-principal Raila Odinga (right) with the party’s candidate Elijah Memusi during the campaigns for the Kajiado Central by-election. [Photo: FILE/ STANDARD]

Kenya: Landslide wins in two crucial by-elections, judicial suspension of repressive laws, a besieged President responding to corruption by suspending nearly a third of his Cabinet and increased money to the counties, are some of the gains the Opposition cites as it marks two years of keeping the Jubilee administration on its toes.

Although the three major parties in the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy – ODM, Wiper and Ford Kenya — are jointly battling an image problem with the dismissal of their watchdog committee in Parliament, they have taken credit for the overt action of the President to nail five of his Cabinet Secretaries and 21 top officials of his administration.

The national chairman of the country’s largest opposition party (ODM), Mr John Mbadi said the Opposition has performed well.

In a candid conversation with The Standard on Saturday, he said his party goes into the middle of their term with a clear agenda adding that “we have taught the Government clear lessons”.

“Our work is to hold the Government to account. That’s what we have done. We have stopped repressive laws from being passed; we have made sure that the audit reports are up to date, and that means we denied the Government an excuse to continue giving counties little money. We also keep pressure on the President to deal with corruption and you can see he has acted,” said Mbadi yesterday.

The Opposition even boasts of having “donated” one of its MPs, Major General (rtd) Joseph Nkaissery to the Jubilee administration as the Cabinet Secretary for Interior, to help the President deal with the runaway insecurity.

The only blot is that the Opposition-led Public Accounts Committee, which is dominated by members of the Jubilee coalition, has now been dissolved, with some Opposition members accusing outgoing chairman Ababu Namwamba, the secretary general of ODM, of not being beyond reproach.

But Namwamba and Mbadi take solace in the fact that it is the work of the PAC, to clear a five-year backlog of audit reports, that made sure the county governments are now poised to get at least Sh283 billion, as per the most recent audit reports.

The Opposition began with the referendum call to push for more money to the counties and to sidestep the politics, it went into an oversight overdrive, burning the midnight oil to clean up the audit findings. In there, it found that some of the power men in the Jubilee administration had pilfered Sh2.9 billion in confidential expenditure.

The dividend for the Opposition was the presidential purge of Mutea Iringo, the Principal Secretary of Defence, who is under investigations at the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

“We have been pushing the Government to allocate more resources. Now they have no option because we have up-to-date audit reports that have been approved,” Mbadi added.

The chairman of the Public Investments Committee Adan Keynan is also a happy that he cleared a backlog with the state corporations which have hitherto been a bastion of corruption. He has finalised with the 19th report of the PIC.

“This is an unprecedented report in its own right. It contains reports of 71 State Corporations from 1988 to date. I urge my colleagues to read and note its contents,” said Keynan.

He was not just gloating, he wants the country to know he has done his job of making sure that taxpayers’ money is used well. CORD has also pushed the Government to reject repressive laws such as the security laws, when the Government grew intransigent because of the numerical strength of the ruling Jubilee coalition, the Opposition went to court and had the offensive clauses declared illegal.

It has also pushed for laws such as the Victims Protection Act by its member Millie Mabona (Mbita) and Mbadi also amended the Value-Added Tax Act to make sure the price of goods went down.

“We have done well inside and outside Parliament,” the ODM chairman said.

Elijah Memusi, CORD’s newest MP from the cosmopolitan Kajiado Central confounded Jubilee when he won the elections.

Memusi spent ten minutes extolling the Opposition leaders, thanking his voters, and lambasting the ruling Jubilee coalition and its embryonic Jubilee Alliance Party, which lost the parliamentary seat contest in his constituency.