- Suspects engineered the award of direct procurement of the uniform dress materials.
- Ingonga who took over in September has heightened the war on corruption
Image: PCS
Two senior officials at the Kenya Wildlife Service are starring at prosecution over irregular procurement of uniforms, the Star has established.
The new Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga has approved the charges over the scandal that is estimated to have cost the taxpayer Sh11.5 million.
Ingonga who took over in September, has heightened the war on corruption and has already cracked the whip on the looting of affordable fertiliser.
The two suspects are alleged to have engineered the award of a direct procurement of the uniform dress materials.
Any direct procurement for a value exceeding Sh500,000 should be reported to the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority within 14 days.
This was not done.
KWS accounting officer and a senior procurement officer will however not be prosecuted.
"We found the evidence against (name withheld) for the offence of conspiracy weak as he states that the procurement department had delegated different functions to sections and he was not in charge of processing procurement for security division," internal ODPP documents seen by the Star states.
"He also rejected procurement of the materials using direct procurement in the tender committee meeting held on October 14, 2013."
The procurement officials who had initially been earmarked for prosecution will now be a state witness.
The new details emerged just days after the DPP charged some alleged fertiliser fraud suspects.
This after detectives uncovered an alleged elaborate theft syndicate in the Sh15 billion affordable fertiliser programme.
Several people, including some Ministry of Agriculture officials, have been charged with alleged corruption.
Igonga has told the suspects to carry their own cross.
“People should stop doing things assuming that if they come from a certain region or community, the law won’t haunt them,” Igonga said.
It has emerged that some top officials at the Ministry of Agriculture allegedly registered non-existent farmers with thousands of acres of land, and used these fictitious individuals to collect hundreds of bags of subsidised fertiliser.
The affordable fertiliser is a key legacy project for President William Ruto which he hopes to use to turn around the country's dwindling food basket.