Former US President Barrack Obama's younger sister, Auma Obama, has joined the ranks of Kenyans citizens questioning the amount spent on the collection of data and the production of the BBI report.
In a Twitter post on Thursday, November 28, the vocal recipient of the Walter Scheel Prize activism prize in Germany expressed her reservations about the secretive nature that the government had adopted in terms of revealing the full cost of the BBI project.
She was talking in response to rumors that were doing rounds online claiming that the government had spent to the tune of Ksh10 billion to collect information from Kenyans and to consolidate the BBI report before it was officially unveiled on Wednesday, November 27.
"How can a report (pen to paper) cost so much? The government has the resources internally to put together any report on anything in the country. Who was getting this money? Can/ have these funds be/ been audited?" she posed.
Early Thursday morning, BBI taskforce joint secretary, Martin Kimani came out to deny the rumors, stating that the amount they had spent was not close to what was being alleged on the internet.
“We did not have anywhere close to that amount of money. That’s a figure that has just been thrown around the internet and it is not true. I am not the administrator, but the figure was less than 1% of that Ksh10 billion supposedly,” he clarified on Citizen TV’s Day Break show
He, however, turned down the request to reveal the exact amount of money spent during the process and insisted that he would first sit down with the administrator and establish the exact figures.
“Let me not speculate because that plays into a very particular negative narrative in Kenya that comes from an understandable sense that Kenyans’ money is being wasted,” he said.
Auma's sentiments were supported by other Kenyans who felt that the BBI report did not reflect the expectations that they had before its release.
"Let's not bury our heads in the sand like a proverbial ostrich... We have had other reports before, which equally gobbled taxpayers' cash, we never bothered to ask the hard question, those in power found it normal. They didn't stop. Today another Ksh10 billion or less gone," Kelvin Okeyo posed.
"When the state crafts and interested parties realised TJRC was going to expose too much, a friendly and compliant person had to [be] recruited to deal with such and make a favorable report. But where is it even the "favourable" report?" Jack Nduya wondered in reference the yet-to-be-released findings of the commission that handed a newly-elected President Uhuru the final report in May 2013.
Auma
