Senators on Thursday issued a 14-day ultimatum to Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja to explain how waste-collecting companies received tenders amounting to Ksh16 billion.
While appearing before the Senate Committee on Finance and Budget, the governor was instructed to provide a comprehensive written explanation within 14 days.
In the directive, the governor was instructed to submit evidence of the work done to necessitate payment of such magnitude.
Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna while commenting on the matter, termed the issuance of the tenders to the said companies illegal.
The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) Secretary General called for an investigation into the matter, claiming the companies were part of the syndicate siphoning taxpayers' money.
“This is criminality, it is absolute criminality, you will see from the documents provided that a company is charging the county twice for the same service, so the concern that Senator Khalwale is raising is very valid,” Senator Sifuna argued.
"Governor you must explain to us, a correlation between these pending bills especially in the area of solid waste management and the problems we are going through right now as a county because there are a lot of complaints that the county government is not collecting garbage."
While issuing the directive to the governor, the committee chairperson Ali Roba ordered Sakaja to provide full documentation on all the transactions made by the NMS.
According to Roba, the documentation of the transactions was to ascertain that the companies did the work before demanding the Ksh16 billion payment.
"What we want to fix is the responsibility, who is responsible for the liabilities incurred under the Nairobi Metropolitan Service, I want you to come in systematically because this informs our formal engagement," Ali Roba stated.
"What we need here is to confirm if these monies were legally incurred and then we will protect the contractors to get their monies," he added.
Sakaja while defending himself urged the committee to summon the officials of the defunct Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) to account for Ksh16 billion in pending bills.
