The Orange Democratic Movement party and United Democratic Alliance were among the biggest beneficiaries as Members of Parliament elected leaders of the National Assembly Committees.
In the elections conducted on Wednesday, March 12, some MPs lost their seats and were replaced by the colleagues supported in the broad-based government arrangement.
One notable change was in the Budget Committee, where Alego Usonga MP Samuel Atandi (ODM) replaced Kiharu MP Ndindi Nyoro.
Atandi will be deputized by Endebess MP Robert Pukose of the UDA party.
Yesterday, Suna East MP Junet Mohammed launched a scathing attack on former Budget and Appropriations Committee chair Ndindi Nyoro, accusing him of manipulating budget allocations to favor his Kiharu Constituency.
Visibly angry, Junet Pointed out what he termed as outright unfairness in how the committee distributed resources. He questioned the justification behind MPs taking benchmarking trips to Kiharu, insinuating that Nyoro was using his position to divert funds meant for national development to his own backyard.
“The Budget and Appropriations Committee of this house has reached a level where members of Parliament are being taken to the chair’s constituency for benchmarking, yet all of us are supposed to receive equal NG-CDF allocations.
The former chair was using skewed practices to allocate funds to his constituency—tell me, which MP can do what Ndindi was doing with the meager allocations of Ksh 100 million?” Junet fired.
The allegations took an even more serious turn when Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah weighed in, exposing how Nyoro allegedly funneled funds meant for other regions into Murang’a County projects, including classrooms in Kiharu.
“It’s true that the public participation process in the budget-making process has been grossly abused. Imagine, Ksh 1 billion was set aside for public participation, but certain individuals saw it fit to allocate themselves an extra Ksh 10 million.
These are people in the committee with vested interests who misdirect allocations to their own constituencies and counties that were never in the budget,” Ichung’wah lamented.
The Majority Leader went on to paint a grim picture of how national projects suffered under the committee’s leadership.
“It is unacceptable that a national polytechnic meant to benefit from Ksh 100 million ends up getting only Ksh 20 million, while another, in a constituency whose MP sits on the budget committee, receives a whopping Ksh 250 million!” Ichung’wah thundered.
Yet, irony looms large—Ndindi Nyoro has consistently been ranked among the best-performing MPs in CDF utilization since 2013. But in politics, merit is no shield against daggers drawn in the dark.
