Members of Parliament have issued Transport Principal Secretary Mohamed Daghar a one-week ultimatum over the management of the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) which has been accused of inefficiency.
Daghar has been instructed to submit a report before the National Assembly Transport Committee regarding the running of KAA following the sacking of former MD Alex Gitari by CS Kipchumba Murkomen and the authority's board last week.
According to the committee that visited the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) on Wednesday, there were lapses in the running of the authority that is mandated to manage airports across the country.
The MPs expressed dissatisfaction over the running of the authority which they explained was exposed during the two-hour blackout witnessed at the airport last week on Friday from 9 pm. During the nationwide blackout, the backup generators failed to power up.
"Your standards are currently unsatisfactory. We need leaders who are conversant with the status of this airport as the hub for this region and who will maintain international standards," Ndia MP George Kariuki stated.
During the visit, the committee also sought to know from the PS why Murkomen and the KAA board opted to replace Gitari with another staff - Henry Ogoye - who served under the former MD.
The legislators wondered whether meaningful change would be achieved by the internal replacements.
In response, the acting MD (Ogoye) explained that he was not tasked with the engineering department which was to oversee the operations of the backup generators. He insisted that he only served as Strategy Director in his previous post.
However, he maintained that relevant steps were being undertaken to make the generators more efficient with power blackout drills also planned in the new strategies.
On his part, PS Daghar maintained that the changes were necessary as the KAA management had been marred with inefficiency.
"In response, the PS acknowledged that there had been challenges within the management of KAA. He attributed the lack of a contingency plan when the blackout struck to these challenges.
"He told the Committee that this inefficiency had led to the Board’s termination of the contracts for the Managing Director and the General Manager for Engineering," the report by the Transport Committee read in part.
