President Uhuru Kenyatta, on Friday, directed Attorney General Paul Kihara to draft a bill aimed at barring public servants from running private businesses.
Speaking during the National Anti-Corruption Conference hosted at Bomas, Uhuru specifically sought to prevent the servants from running the businesses in the same industry that they supervise.
“I direct the Attorney-General to come up with a bill to address the question of conflict of interest and the unintended consequences of the Ndegwa Commission of 1971,” stated the President.
He further gave the servants an option asking them to choose whether they will work for the public or run their own businesses.
"State or public officers will have one choice: Serve in the public arena or go and do private business,” offered Uhuru.
To drive the point home, the agitated president told the story of a senior police officer who pretends to regulate the transport sector yet he owns a fleet of public transport vehicles.
Uhuru further revealed that the enforcement of the proposed bill would bar influential people from using their positions to acquire information only to end up using it for their personal endeavours.
“Example, MPs including senators should no longer be able to use committee powers to demand information from public offices and then utilise that same information in their own pursuits,” he remarked.
The directive was part of the president’s relentless fight against corruption in which he declared that no person was above the law no matter how influential they thought they were.
The President was seeking to reverse the 1971 bill by the Duncan Ndegwa Commission that had allowed public servants to manage personal businesses. A bill that many servants had exploited for long.
