Senate Majority Leader Kipchumba Murkomen, on Thursday, September 26, launched a new onslaught against President Uhuru Kenyatta following his recent decision to halt the construction of Kimwarer Dam and downscale the Arror Dam projects.
The Elgeyo-Marakwet senator shared details of his petition on his social media handles, claiming that he had requested the Senate to intervene in the matter on behalf of his county residents, who were supposed to benefit from the project.
"This afternoon I presented a petition to the Senate on behalf of residents of Elgeyo-Marakwet County (EMC) on the cancellation of Kimwarer Dam and Scaling down of Arror Dam. We shall ensure that in the fullness of time, the people of EMC will get justice," he wrote on his Twitter page.
In the 4-paged petition, he accused President Kenyatta of constituting an 'illegal' committee, whose findings he adopted and used to cancel the project, which in his opinion was contrary to what the law stipulated.
He further claimed that the decision by the president to pick the project specifically, amongst many other projects in the country, was a malicious attempt to deny Elgeyo Marakwet constituents benefits from the projects.
"The people of Elgeyo Marakwet are deeply aggrieved by the decision to interfere with these projects, whose significance to the lives of hundreds of thousands stands in jeopardy," he wrote.
Murkomen further criticized the president's decision to cancel the project both on the grounds of the lack of feasibility study and the existence of a faultline on the earmarked site.
He asserted that the task force that the president had convened to investigate the dam's feasibility, misled him by using a report that was rife with inaccuracies as it was published more than 20 years ago.
He also called out the president over the cancellation of the project, on claims that the residents would require billions in terms of compensation before the projects began.
This, he claimed, came as a shock to him, since every other dam project that is undertaken in the country, landowners were compensated as per the constitution.
"The petitioners find the decision to ground the cancellation of the project in the need for compensation to be disturbingly discriminatory of the landowners and communities in Keiyo, Marakwet," he penned.
He called upon the Senate to step in and halt the 'unfair' decision by the president to cancel the Kimwarer and downscale the Arror dams projects.
