Frustration and fatigue was evident in the heated exchanges that marked last Tuesday’s hearing of Parliament’s Finance Committee as yet another attempt to unravel the mystery of Charterhouse Bank’s continued closure appeared to fail.
Before the committee were Finance minister Uhuru Kenyatta and the Permanent Secretary, Joseph Kinyua.
As the custodians of the government’s coffers, the duo was expected to have the final word on the failure to reopen the bank closed four years ago amid a wave of bad publicity.
But Mr Kenyatta and Mr Kinyua surprised the MPs when they said, in a brief statement, that the matter was not within their jurisdiction and should be referred, as the Banking Act says, to the Central Bank of Kenya.
The two top Treasury men then spent the better part of two hours defending the ministry’s apparent inability or failure to act and either reopen the bank or liquidate it — anything to enable depositors to gain access to their money.
Towards the end of the meeting punctuated by shaking of heads by the Treasury duo, Mr Kenyatta said the committee would get nowhere by questioning the ministry.
“You are flogging a dead horse. Neither you nor we (the ministry) have the mandate to resolve (the closure). All we can do is seek a speedy resolution to the matter,” said Mr Kenyatta.
All government agencies related to the matter have washed their hands off it, and the Charterhouse Bank affair has become the one thing nobody, except the Finance committee, wants to touch.
On Tuesday, committee chairman Chris Okemo spoke with emotion about the team’s failure to gain much ground on the matter three months after it began investigations.
“There have been allegations and mystery, and these (meetings) have not yielded much despite our digging,” he said.
Gem MP Jakoyo Midiwo shared his sentiments. “The more I listen to this story on Charterhouse, the more I get the feeling that something is going on somewhere,” he said.
This is the second time both MPs are handling the matter. They sat on the Finance Committee of the Ninth Parliament, which also investigated the Charterhouse affair in 2006.
In its report of October 2006, the then Finance Committee, which was chaired by Mr Okemo, recommended that the bank be reopened. A committee’s report has to be tabled, debated and approved by majority MPs in the House for its recommendations to be adopted, and that one was not done until Parliament was dissolved the following year.
