MP wants Parliament to probe Maraga conduct

Nyeri Town MP Ngunjiri Wambugu wants Chief Justice David Maraga's work audited.

Wambugu said he will initiate a process in Parliament to achieve that end. Reacting to recent concerns Maraga raised, Wambugu said MPs should hold the CJ to account, citing his statements that criticised President Uhuru Kenyatta for disobedience of court orders.

The MP said the CJ is not just an ordinary leader but a leader of one of the three arms of government and should explain how he has unsuccessfully tried to reach out to the President.

The CJ on Monday last week expressed frustration at President Kenyatta’s refusal to appoint 41 judges recommended by the Judicial Service Commission, a decision he blamed for the case backlog crisis in the courts.

Maraga also claimed that his efforts to reach the President had been futile. But Wambugu questioned what that meant, demanding specificity.

"What is it? Has he written to him or how has he been trying to reach the President so that we are able to understand what he has done but has been ignored?” he asked. The MP spoke to the media in his office in Nyeri.

It is wrong for the CJ to throw tantrums in public against the President as that gives Kenyans a reason to lose confidence in the presidency, he said.

He said this was not the first press conference the CJ has had to criticise the President and wondered whether this was his mode of communicating issues of government. This, he said, undermines other arms of government.

The legislator urged the CJ to explain why he should continue to demand the appointment of 41 judges, yet he knows integrity issues have been raised against some of them. Wambugu said the information he has gathered is that the issues have been detailed in a report.

He said the report was also presented to the JSC but it ignored it before releasing the names.

“The Judiciary has also been ignoring its own court orders. There are four decisions that were made by courts in regard to four judicial officers who were supposed to be reinstated but were not,”  he said.

The lawmaker named the officers as Rosemary Mutoka, Daniel Ochenja, Lucy Njora and Brian Khaemba.

“These four judges got orders from court for them to be reinstated and some of them are years old today, but to date, the Chief Justice has never implemented those orders.”

He said the CJ should not be pointing fingers at others for not obeying court orders while he is also not obeying those made by the officers he oversees.

Wambugu questioned why the President should be reduced to a rubber stamp over decisions taken by the JSC and be barred from questioning the credentials of nominees.

"I am going to be asking us, as Parliament, to ask these questions to both the Executive and the Judiciary because this fight doesn’t augur well with the confidence that Kenyans have in the Judiciary,” he said.

The Judiciary derives its mandate from the people, hence there has to be a process of engaging it to ensure it serves the interest of the people. 

Though Kenya has less than 20,000 lawyers out of the 50 million citizens, the Judiciary is primarily a sector that deals with lawyers, while 75 per cent of the JSC members are lawyers, he said.

“We need to ask ourselves as a country whether we want to give such a strong and important arm of government to less than 17,000 people,” Wambugu said.

He said he has initiated a process in Parliament to look at the composition of the JSC, adding that the commission should have representation from other diverse parts of the country and cannot be run by people from one sector alone.

The jury system should be introduced so that verdict whether one is guilty or not should not be left to one person, he said.