The East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) has announced it will investigate former Secretary General of the East African Community Peter Mathuki for corruption and abuse of office. The decision was announced on Tuesday, May 14, by the regional house after one of its members pinned Mathuki on misconduct related to mismanagement of East African Community (EAC) finances and favouritism in recruitment processes. ALSO READ: Kenya drops nominee for top EAC job, names replacement Mathuki officially assumed office as Secretary General of the EAC in April 2021 and had served for three years before he was nominated as Kenya’s ambassador to Russia in early March. Kenya has since named his replacement at the regional bloc. In his submission to the house committee on Legal Rules and Privileges on Monday, EALA member Kennedy Mukulia accused Mathuki of “impunity, gross abuse of office, disregard for the [EAC] Treaty and other legal instruments, which indicated “grand corporate irresponsibility and mismanagement of the affairs of the Community.” ALSO READ: EAC Secretary General meets regional force commander Citing documents linking Mathuki to corrupt misconduct, the lawmaker accused some members of Mathuki’s team of being “collaborators” who “ensured wanton expenditure of community resources.” “Those who stood [in] their way, were either intimidated, redeployed and reassigned different duties or banned from travelling,” read the documents cited in a statement by EALA on Tuesday. “The Council to the Community became a prominent spectator, leaving the community in the hands of one man.” Mukulia alleged that the EAC’s Directorate of Finance spent funds “whose utilization was never disclosed to the Assembly,” and accused the Accounting Officer, the Director of Finance, the Principal Accountant and the Senior Budget Officer of conspiring “to create and operate a separate and parallel budget process that is not within” the community’s financial rules and regulations. The documents tabled by Mukulia also alleged that the Directorate of Finance of a “habit of inventing travels to receive allowances, citing an instance in which the “Director of Finance approved travel for the Principal Accountant, Senior Budget Officer and Senior Accountant to attend a ‘fictious budget session of EALA in March 2024 in Nairobi’, while he was in Nairobi for the same activity, when clearly the session in Nairobi at that time was not a budget session.” Mukulia also said that the Directorate of Finance has been issuing irregular imprest for the former Secretary General’s travels. He argued that the Directorate of Finance allocated imprest to the Secretary General of between $5000-$20,000 “every time he travelled,” and yet “there is no budget line for imprest.” “This means that they have been irregularly allocating funds from approved activities in order to fund the travels of the former Secretary General,” he said. The lawmaker also alleged that Mathuki’s administration abused and mismanaged EAC’s recruitment process by “irregularly recruiting relatives, friends and girlfriends into the service of the community.” The documents also point to the “creation of separate payrolls to accommodate payments for individuals who are irregularly recruited and approval for these individuals to receive staff entitlements including settlement allowances, and payment of arrears,” Mukulia said. The lawmaker said staff members who resisted or rejected Mathuki’s policies and intentions “were either redeployed, or had their functions assigned to others who could collaborate.” “In some instances, a private communication firm whose ownership is close to the former Secretary General was hired to take over the functions of EAC Communications Department without the Approval of the Council,” he said. Mukulia urged the house committee to investigate Mathuki and his office and to “establish the officers whose deliberate efforts, or negligence facilitated these abuses to establish themselves in the community.” The Legal, Rules and Privileges Committee is expected to submit its findings and recommendations on the issue once the investigations are concluded, the house said without communicating when the inquiries will begin or end.
