Split rocks Nacada as audit begins

By MARGARET KANINI

Nairobi, Kenya: A major split has rocked the body that fights drugs and alcohol abuse in the country.

The divisions have surfaced at a time when there’s an ongoing investigation into the loss of millions of shillings in what the chairman of the board, Mr. John Mututho, has called book-keeping fraud.

At a news conference held at the offices of the National Authority for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse on Friday,  Mututho revealed that the board was divided on the fate of the CEO, Dr William Okedi.

Some of the board members wanted the top officers at Nacada’s secretariat suspended to pave way for the audit, while the majority said the audit had to go on with the serving officers in office.

“Six out of the eight board members were of the view that agency bosses stay in office as the auditing goes on,” Mututho said.

However, Okedi assured the public and board members that none of the top officials will interfere with the audit reports that will be carried out by the internal auditors.

“Board members have resolved that the audit exercise will continue even while we are still in the office and that the auditors will do their work independently without interference from any board member,”Okedi said.

But that promise did not go down well with the boss of Nacada’s Internal Audit department,  Fazul Mohammed, who said he would prefer the board members to step down while the audit process continues, to pave way for timely and efficient results that will be able to determine how much money is missing from the agency’s accounts.

“We are not saying anybody is guilty here but whether they are or not, they should step down to pave way for auditing”, he said.

Fazul added that preliminary reports show that there is money missing from the few districts that they have already audited.

“We have seen that there are very many irregularities in Nacada’s accounts and the question now is not whether there is any money missing but how much is missing.

“To answer this question, we must first audit all the 264 districts in the country,”Fazul continued.

Fazul said the audit report that is to determine how much money is missing from the Agency will be presented after 45 days.

Mututho added that the board was not comfortable with  three of the  12 members of the audit department that have been appointed by the office of the Auditor general to investigate NACADA’s missing fund and so they should be dismissed.

Fazul also recommended that the former chair and CEO of NACADA be investigated for the role they played in the missing public funds.

He said the irregularities were noticed long before the current leadership of the organization.

The audit comes after Mututho earlier on decried the embezzlement of the authority’s cash; an amount that he estimated ran into millions of shillings.

Mututho had earlier on said that the money that the organization gets from the licenses ends up in people’s pockets and  that some staff had to resign because they could not stand the mismanagement and fraud.