Win for city assembly clerk Ngwele as EACC says he’s legally in office

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has affirmed that the appointment of Mr Jacob Ngwele as Nairobi County Assembly clerk was within the law and that he is legally in office.

The verdict follows investigations by the commission spanning seven months after Speaker Beatrice Elachi invited the agency to investigate the appointment of Mr Ngwele. This was after the two fell out with Ms Elachi claiming that the clerk was irregularly appointed.

In a letter addressed to the Speaker, EACC confirmed that Mr Ngwele’s appointment was above board and within the law. This followed investigations into allegations of irregular appointment and drawing of huge allowances between October 2018 and May 2019.

In the letter, the commission said the investigations established that the Nairobi County Assembly Service Board resolved to absorb and confirmed the appointment of Mr Ngwele as shown by minutes of a meeting held June 10, 2014.

INTERIM CLERKS

The decision of the Board to absorb and confirm the appointment of Mr Ngwele as Nairobi County Assembly clerk, the investigations established, was informed by a letter by the Transition Authority, Ref No. TA/8/48 dated January 20, 2014.

The investigations further pointed out that courts had also ruled in favour of interim clerks on the question whether their appointments by the transition authority met the constitutional threshold of an open advertisement, competitive recruitment, participation and inclusion of all competitive persons.

“Mr Ngwele further sued the county assembly service board in civil suit No. 2108 of 2014 regarding his employment where a consent order was recorded in court in respect to his employment and the matter was settled,” read the letter dated July 1, 2020.

Speaker Elachi and Mr Ngwele have not been seeing eye-to-eye since they fell out in 2018, with the former maintaining that Mr Ngwele is not the assembly’s clerk.

Even after the court ruled in favour of the clerk, Ms Elachi went ahead to suspend him and also eject him from the assembly’s board, subsequently locking him out of his office.

The Speaker also formed an ad hoc committee to investigate the clerk and in its report, the committee declared Mr Ngwele a “stranger” and consequently an acting clerk was appointed.

VACANCY NOTICE

She has also gone ahead to advertise the position declaring a vacancy in the office of the clerk.

An advisory by Solicitor General Ken Ogeto affirmed that Mr Ngwele is in office legally but Ms Elachi has maintained her ground.

She removed the clerk as the signatory of the assembly’s accounts at the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) in December 2019 but Mr Ngwele was restored to the position in April on the strength of letters from Mr Ogeto and Nairobi Finance CEC Allan Igambi.

Despite several attempts by Ms Elachi to reverse the decision, the CBK has stood its ground.

On the accusation that Mr Ngwele was drawing allowances higher than those attributable to his office, the investigations established that Sh1.2 million extraneous allowances had been earned by the clerk between September 2015 and April 2019 at Sh28,000 every month without the approval from the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).

 “To this end, therefore, we advise that all the extraneous allowances earned by Mr Ngwele without the approval of SRC should be recovered in full,” EACC said.