Kiambu Senator Karungo wa Thang'wa in his capacity as the Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Roads, Transport and Housing on Tuesday shed light on the progress the committee has made in probing the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)- Adani takeover deal.
Thang’wa revealed that the committee would be tabling a report on the floor of the Senate after compiling its findings which includes responses from relevant parties such as Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi, his Transport counterpart Davis Chirchir, their Principal Secretaries, and the Public Private Partnership (PPP) Director General Cristopher Kirigua.
Karungo Thang’wa, who was speaking during an interview on Spice FM, said that the preliminary conclusion of the committee was that the deal went against all the prescriptions of the law especially the PPP Act which states, “For you to give a PIP you have to justify why you did not go a competitive way. This means that the superior part of doing this deal is competition.”
Thang’wa observed that the committee had therefore come up with several recommendations including his very own three that would be featured in the final report.
To begin with, the Kiambu senator noted that the government needed to incorporate the Swiss Challenge before the process even kicked off.
“The Swiss challenge is that whenever a government receives any privately initiated proposal, you make it public and ask people, do you have a better one than this? If there’s no one that has a better one than that, then we can go into the process and look into it,” he clarified.
Acknowledging the successful countrywide public participation process for the impeachment of Rigathi Gachagua as deputy president, Thang’wa noted that the committee would make sure that the deal would undergo a public participation process to include every Kenyan in the decision-making.
“The country has shown us that you can do public participation without a lot of public money used in the whole country within a day. This Adani deal must be taken through public participation,” Thang’wa stated.
“In all 47 counties, it must be done for people to know where their airport is being taken,” he added.
For the committee’s third recommendation, Thang’wa said that committee members would be recommending prosecution of the directors of key entities involved in the deal noting, “We are also going to say that the EACC must investigate a few officers like the KAA. The bottom line is it’s not above board.”
The committee began probing into the Adani deal when details of the secret nature of the deal procurement came to light after a whistleblower notified Kisii Senator Richard Onyonka of the dealings, which subsequently captured the attention of Kenyans.
Even though several officials including the Road and Transport CS and the National Treasury CS have been summoned by both the Senate and the National Assembly, details about the deal still remain scanty.
Currently, the deal is yet to be signed. MPs on September 24 directed the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) against proceeding with the deal negotiations until Parliamentary investigations into the matter are completed.
