Over 1,000 Kenya Ports Authority staff hold imaginary academic papers, audit reveals

Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) Workers leave the Mombasa Industrial Court after a ruling on their case on Tuesday 22nd September. The court ruled out Mungatana from representing the workers in the case and asked KPA to go on with their activity of sacking incompetent or those workers who forged their education certificates. [Photo/Kelvin Karani/STANDARD]

Some 962 workers and 423 managers at the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) have nonexistent academic certificates or qualifications, a forensic audit has revealed.

Confidential documents filed at a Mombasa court have shed new light on the fake certificate employment scam at KPA, which has already sacked 132 disgraced workers, including 25 lower and middle-level managers.

These documents have spurred fresh confusion over the actual extent of the rot and number of those affected by doubts on the authenticity of their papers.

Data at KPA’s human resource (HR) department which, apparently, was entered into the database between 2012 and August last year, indicates that 962 workers and 423 managers had certificates or qualifications that were found to be imaginary after the audit.

“There were 962 union and 423 management employees who indicated in their employee-detail forms that they possessed certain qualifications, which was captured in the HR Master Data,” says a report.

The audit further reveals that a KPA committee appointed to verify certificates “observed that these qualifications were nonexistent.”

The report does not say whether these ‘nonexistent’ qualifications are false or illegal, and also fails to indicate if the HR conducted a further verification to ascertain how or why this data was entered into their database.

The audit has further raised the possibility that four degree certificates, purportedly issued to some port workers by universities overseas were still under probe.

FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES

It is unclear whether the ports agency contacted the alleged foreign universities after the defunct Commission for Higher Education (CHE) declined to authenticate them last year.

CHE “advised the Kenya Ports Authority to independently submit them (foreign certificates) to the concerned administering and professional authorities for validation as the commission does not deal with authentication of certificates”.

Yet an internal report presented to the KPA board on August 22 last year also declared that the committee that conducted an investigation of the port’s 7,087 employees, including 1,651 managers, did not have had the “capacity or expertise to determine the authenticity of all employees’ certificates”.

These include those given by workers alleging they had sat the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education and Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education and confirmed that 122 copies of result slips and certificates presented by KPA for verification were found to be forgeries.

The August 22, 2014 report shows that after an initial probe on documents was ordered in 2012, the team isolated 321 suspect professional and academic papers, including 302, which were taken to Kenya National Examination Council (Knec) for authentication.

But despite this, the documents do not erase doubts raised by Industrial Court judge Justice James Rika, who dismissed a case filed by the port workers on September 22 seeking to stop KPA from dismissing them.

Justice Rika said in his judgement that evidence had been adduced to show some people on the original list of cheats were pardoned and that the probe had taken too long to conclude.

Last week, the Dock Workers Union (DWU), which lost a court battle against KPA, threatened to return to court with a dossier exposing what it alleges is a massive cover-up of the fake certificates scandal.

Although the list of those fired includes 25 managers, the union maintains the number of those caught cheating and aiding the cheating involved more staff. DWU Secretary General Simon Sang’ said on Friday that the union will on Monday move to court to challenge the sacking of 132 employees and expose “a racket involving senior officials”.