Why Kenyans take upon themselves to audit state projects

Mr Morara went there recently, and your guess is as good as mine. What is more surprising is that nearly all those projects may have been approved at the funding level, sometimes in more than one budget cycle.

It should be common sense that a person in the rank of a president or even a deputy president would not touch on a project whose funding is likely to be in question, and if so, he still has power to pursue those funds. The big question is, where do these funds go?

Morara‘s quest, birthed out of the Gen-Z protests, is also birthing a new wave of citizen consciousness that must be embraced and rode on. It is encouraging that young people now find time to scrutinise even county budgets and reports, and the discoveries are saddening.

The reality on the ground tells a completely different story from what is on paper. We may have wanted to accuse the office of the Auditor General, but this office never gets the required support. Earlier in the year, the office had its budget slashed by over Sh200 million.

However, even then, it has managed to flag a number of irregular expenditures at various levels of governance. The failure is in what happens thereafter.

There seems not to be a clear process where perpetrators can take individual responsibility for funds meant for unimplemented projects. It gets messier when senior political leaders are involved.

Nonetheless, it is not all lost; besides Morara and company, something else has been done. In June, a group of tech-savvy Kenyans launched a website that tracks every promise made by the Kenya Kwanza government.

The website is called dexxe.notion.site. The hope is that a combination of all these efforts would result in a more conscious electorate and then more responsible leaders.