Raila wants DCI to take up reins of anti-graft war

ODM leader Raila Odinga. He now wants investigators from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to lead the war on graft in the country. PHOTO | DENNIS ONSONGO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • He said that the March 9 handshake was working in the country and was ‘already causing jitters’.
  • Mr Mudavadi told President Uhuru Kenyatta to pursue the purveyors of the illicit trade among them senior government officers.
  • He spoke a day after MPs launched investigations into the circulation of contraband sugar in the market,

Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) leader Raila Odinga wants investigators from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to lead the war on graft in the country.

Mr Odinga said there was no point of giving the job to investigate graft suspects to special institutions like the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), when those involved in such malpractices were ‘simply thieves who should be investigated and arrested by the DCI and later prosecuted and jailed.’

“We do not want witch-hunt. We want proper investigations and prosecutions of those guilty of corruption. We want our people to earn a liv-ing and income through their sweat. We cannot glorify theft. Theft is now called corruption… Theft is theft and these people are just thieves,” said Mr Odinga.

He spoke Thursday when he visited the family of the late senator Ben Oluoch Okello at Sabaki, Machakos County.

HANDSHAKE MEMORANDUM

The ODM chief stated that fighting corruption was among the nine points identified in the handshake memorandum of understanding be-tween him and President Uhuru Kenyatta.

“A lot has been said but what remains is that we must slay the dragon eating into the fabric of our society,” he said.

He said that the March 9 handshake was working in the country and was ‘already causing jitters’.

Separately, National Super Alliance leader Musalia Mudavadi has urged the government to intensify the war against counterfeits, saying that any slowdown in the campaign will embolden those behind it to mortgage the country.

Mr Mudavadi, who spoke a day after MPs launched investigations into the circulation of contraband sugar in the market, told President Uhuru Kenyatta to pursue the purveyors of the illicit trade among them senior government officers.

COUNTERFEITS

“The war on counterfeiters and contraband goods must be fought as thoroughly as the battle with looters of public coffers. The president must take no prisoners. The war on corruption must be fought relentlessly to offset the gushing and torrid revelations of looting of public coffers,” Mr Mudavadi said.

He continued, “The government must uproot the masterminds of this illicit trade within it and institutions set up against counterfeits.”

According to Mr Mudavadi, it isn’t imaginable that counterfeiters, especially in sugar, can have such freedom to flood the country with con-traband sugar within a very short time without collusion of “rotten senior government officers and law enforcement agencies.”

Interestingly, within a day of last week’s unveiling of the Sh3.074 trillion budget by Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich to finance government operations in the next financial year, the cost of a kilogramme of sugar rose sharply from Sh90 to Sh140.

On Wednesday, leader of majority in the National Assembly Mr Aden Duale tabled a list of individuals he claimed were behind the importa-tion of the contraband sugar in the country.