Ouko wants the Constitution to change to cut the powers of the president

Auditor General Edward Ouko wants amendments to the Constitution to create a Head of State separate from the head of government, who will work independently to help protect his office from the wrath of an imperial presidency.

Ouko says that a Head of State will protect his office from being shot down by a powerful President, since auditing the executive is the same as auditing the President, since they are his appointees.

TURBULENT TIMES

While giving his thoughts on an eight-year, tumultuous and non-renewable term in office that ended on Tuesday, Mr. Ouko also said that before the Treasury can read its annual budgets with fanfare in Parliament, his office must first submit a card report on how the government used the resources of the previous year.

“Under the current system, the auditor is against the president and his ministers. If the president protects his ministers, then the audit is diluted, ”Ouko said at a public conference while reviewing his performance as the first general auditor in Kenya under the new Constitution.

He said that by having the Head of State different from the head of government, his office will have a protector and this will help him be more independent.





"My wife told me," you have to be careful, "Mr. Ouko said, recalling some of his turbulent times.

The analysts praised Ouko for having had a stellar performance in terms of pointing out deficiencies in government financial responsibility and exposing corruption. However, a good part of their audit reports were never treated by research agencies. “I think he has acted as an independent Auditor General should do. There were attempts to take independence from the office, but it's good that it never happened, "Robert Shaw, an expert in public policy and accounting, told the Nation.

“It helped us understand what is being stolen; but like all general auditors, he was not the entity that arrested him. His job was to put the facts on the table, which he did. The only weakness is that these audit reports ended there, ”explained Mr. Shaw.

SCALING QUANTITIES

An accumulation of numbers of the eight annual audit reports that he published during his time in office, but continues to accumulate dust, as research agencies and Parliament prefer to look the other way, shows that taxpayers lost an average of Sh1 billion every year through questionable expenses. This means that during the past eight years, Kenyans could have lost Sh8 billion to corrupt individuals and tender the cartels protected by the government's runaway financial systems and corrupt public officials.

While the annual audit reports published by Mr. Ouko's office do not explicitly say that the amazing amounts were actually lost, they were not accounted for properly, which means that a good part of the money may have ended up in some people's pockets. Since 2011, when Mr. Ouko was hired as Auditor General, the estimated gross public expenditure increased from Sh1.17 trillion in the 2011/2012 budget to Sh3.02 trillion in the current year, representing a growth of 158 per hundred. However, this amazing increase in spending has grown along with the amount of money whose spending is suspicious or cannot be explained.

In 2017, Sh5.1 billion collected as revenue was not remitted to the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). In the previous year, Sh3.7 billion did not reach KRA despite being collected, while in 2015 Sh3.1 billion was lost between collection points and Times Tower. Similarly, in 2014, Sh2.7 billion, which was collected as a tax, was pocketed by individuals or not filed under