Senator Yusuf Haji Put on Spot Over CS Fred Matiang'i's Grilling

Furious senators hit out at Director of Public prosecutions (DPP) Noordin Haji's father, Yusuf Haji, over the grilling of Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i and that of his ICT counterpart Joseph Mucheru.

The two were on Wednesday being grilled over the implementation of the National Integrated Information Management Systems (NIIMS) known as the Huduma Namba.

A section of the senators accused Haji of not giving them enough chance to grill the two cabinet secretaries over the project that was expected to be rolled out at Ksh6 Billion.

Earlier reports also indicated that Haji had barred the media from accessing the meeting room.

The move, which was allegedly decided by Haji alone, was meant to be a closed-door type in which members of the press were not invited.

In February, the two CSs failed to appear before the senate committee for grilling and instead sent their secretaries.

The Huduma Namba exercise, which was set out for roll out countrywide on April 2, was subsequently suspended as a result of the failure.

They were summoned after Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot raised concerns over the process's security pinpointing the amount of personal information that would be collected from Kenyans.

The government had announced that the process would take a maximum of 45 days to be completed.

Interior PS Karanja Kibicho revealed that after the process was done, the government would then carry out a 3-month data cleansing exercise before taking a month long data harmonization process.