Over two billion shillings of tax payers’ money could have been squandered in a project to build a hospitality campus at the Coast. The Ronald Ngala Utalii College located in Kilifi has been at the centre of investigation by Parliament’s Public Investments Committees, with the probe pointing to exaggerated costs.
The Tourism Fund under the leadership of former Chief Executive Officer Allan Chenane then decided to downscale the project cost to 4.9 billion shillings. Chenane left office in March last year after he was adversely mentioned in the EACC list of shame.
Fast forward to April 2016, Sh3.07 billion shillings had already been paid out for the project yet only 37 percent of the work had been done. With the reviewed project set to cost 4.9 billion shillings in total, the amount so far paid would be enough to fund 61 percent of the project. Yet the fund still owed at least half a billion shillings to contractors and creditors.
The then Tourism Fund Board Chair Henry Kosgei admitting that things were not adding up.
Earlier, the former CEO Allan Chenane had a rough time explaining why the fund chose to implement a project that had no Cabinet approval.
Cabinet Secretaries Najib Balala of Tourism, Treasury’s Henry Rotich and Phylis Kandie, who previously served in the tourism docket, are persons of interest to the investigations, with documents showing that they facilitated implementation of the development at different times.
According to documents tabled by the fund’s board, Treasury was set to finance the project at a cost of 1.23 billion shillings for four years until 2018.
According to the bulk of documents sent to this writer, the huge scandal has been deliberately delayed with heavy bribery to stall investigations. We’re told of files catching dust in parliament as PIC delays in their delivery.
However, the committee is investigating how the contract for the building of the Kilifi- based Ronald Ngala Utalii College was varied from the Cabinet approved sum of Sh1.9 billion to Sh8.9 billion and latter scaled down to Sh4.9 billion.
M/s Baseline Architects were paid the consultancy fees based on the Sh8.9 billion despite the project having been scaled down to Sh4.9 billion, said the Cabinet secretary.
Ms Kandie said the negotiations between the contractor, M/s Mulji Devraj and Brothers Limited, the Treasury and her former ministry to scale down the project started in November 2013 following austerity measures instituted by the government.
The Cabinet did not discuss or approve any memo sanctioning the construction of the controversial Ronald Ngala Utalii College in Kilifi at a cost of Sh10.4 billion, Tourism minister Najib Balala told Parliament Wednesday.
Mr Balala told the National Assembly’s Public Investments Committee (PIC) that the Sh8.9 billion project has so far consumed Sh4.1 billion on the 35 per cent work done.
“The so called Cabinet memo, signed between Treasury secretary Henry Rotich and then Tourism minister Phyllis Kandie in 2014 has not been approved,” Mr Balala said, adding that the Cabinet office had confirmed that the memo that the Tourism Trust Fund relied on to award the multi-billion shilling project had not at any time been slotted for deliberation.
Mr Balala revealed that the Tourism Trust Fund management rushed through the tendering process and executed it despite the existence of a Cabinet moratorium stopping the award of tenders worth more than Sh500,000.
