National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi has scolded Chief Justice (CJ) Martha Koome, telling her that the Judiciary has no option but to stand the scrutiny of MPs.
Muturi who addressed Koome in a letter, chided the CJ, reminding her that the Judiciary is not exempt from the scrutiny of the Parliament and that any member of the Judiciary summoned before the National Assembly should appear before it without hesitating.
"The oversight of the National Assembly is embodied on one hand in article 226 (2) of the constitution which provides that the accounting officer of a public entity is accountable to the National Assembly for its financial management and on the other in article 229 which confers upon the National Assembly the power to receive audit reports, debate, consider and take the appropriate action based on the reports," reads Muturi's letter in part.
In the letter, Muturi reminded Koome that the National Assembly had the mandate to particularly scrutinize the expenditure of the Judiciary.
Muturi added that the National Assembly has the power and mandate to receive audit reports and deliberate over them, referring to the reports by the Auditor General.
The speaker's rejoinder comes days after the CJ had expressed concern over members of the Judiciary being summoned to appear before parliamentary committees, which she felt undermined the Judiciary.
Ms Koome had written a letter to the Parliament, arguing that the summons undermined the independence of the Judiciary, and asked that such summons be ignored.
Koome had moved to block the Chief Registrar of Judiciary Anne Amadi from appearing before MPs to explain why the Judiciary had for the last seven years, failed to hire a finance director.
CJ Koome also complained that MPs had summoned the Human Resource Committee of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to probe the position of the Director of Finance, saying that it was solely the responsibility of the Judicial Service Commission to resolve the matter.
CJ Koome had also expressed her concern with MPs behavior, saying that some of them have ulterior motives and hidden agendas in the name of playing an oversight role over the Judiciary.
