•Wandayi says that the recommendations of the house committees should have force of law after a specified time should implementers fail to act
•He also decried 'frivolous' and 'suspect' amendments of stinging recommendations during house debates.
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Recommendations by parliamentary committees should come into force automatically even if those required to implement them fail to do so, an MP has proposed.
National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee chairman Opiyo Wandayi says the law should be changed so that once a committee makes recommendations in its report and the executive agencies required to implement them fail to act after sometime, say six months, the recommendations automatically take effect.
Wandayi said that Parliament's role in combating graft is often impeded by the fact that its committees are only allowed to make recommendations, which are then passed to other agents of the executive to effect.
He spoke during an exclusive interview on Wednesday.
"We only investigate, write reports with punitive recommendations as some cases maybe, but our work ends there. Other agents of the state are required to take over but in most cases, they fail to execute them extensively or even don't act at all," he said.
There have been numerous cases where parliamentary committees find public officials with questions to answer on their role in office and recommend punitive actions, among them being barred from holding public office after due process but no action is eventually taken.
A case in point is Kirinyaga Governor Anne Waiguru who, when serving as Devolution CS, the house watchdog committee recommend she should be barred from holding public office.
The complaints by the Ugunja lawmaker add to that of House Speaker Justin Muturi who, last month, whined that the work of the legislature is affected by the lackluster and sometimes outright non-implementation by the agents of the executive.
Muturi had also hinted that laws could be changed to allow sleuths from DCI and EACC attend committee sittings when public officers give evidence as part of expediting the war against sleaze.
WAndayi also said the effectiveness of his, just as other committees, is impeded by extraneous interests sometimes at play during debates of their reports in the plenary, with their recommendations watered down and even generalised.
For example, Wandayi said, his committee's version of IEBC report which described how perverse corruption at the electoral agency was in the last general election and recommended tough action as remedies, was watered down through amendments at the floor of the house during plenary.
"Our version of the report was revolutionary and made recommendations which would have been far-reaching in cleaning the mess at the agency and having people take responsibility. But other interest got in saw it amended," he said.
The report had required the agency to be disbanded and the commissioners as well as a number of accounting officers taken to task over what it found as inflation of the cost of the two elections in 2017.