Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji bars media during meeting with Interior CS Fred Matiang'i and ICT CS Joe Mucheru

Haji kicks out media during meeting with Matiang'i and Mucheru

Mark Mwithaga

March 28, 2019 5:05 PM

You are not allowed to cover this

Interior CS Fred Matiang'i and ICT CS Joe Mucheru

Journalist were on Thursday locked out of the meeting between senators and Interior CS Fred Matiang’i and ICT CS Jose Mucheru in regards to the implementation of the National Integrated Information Management Systems (NIIMS) known as the Huduma Namba.

Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji who is the chair of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security, Defense and Foreign Relations, was claimed to have asked reporters to leave the room as the meeting would be conducted behind closed doors.

Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji during a past media briefing ece-auto-gen

The move by the chairman which caught a section of the senators by surprise, was alleged to have been a decision made by Haji alone without their consultations.

Matiang’i and Mucheru were appearing before the committee to explain the controversial execution of the Sh6 billion digital registration without the approval of parliament.

Nandi Senator Samson Cherargei had noted that the meeting had made no progress on the matter.

"The meeting was restrictive. We didn’t interrogate the issue as much as we wished," remarked Cherargei.

The Garissa senator however defended his move and stated that the media would have embarrassed the Attorney General.

"The reasons why we decided to exclude the media was because we wanted to have an in-depth discussion on this issue.

“As you are aware, the matter is in court. If we open it up for public discourse it may end up embarrassing the Attorney-General when he goes to defend the case in court," explained Haji.

Huduma Namba registration temporarily suspended

The committee had last month temporarily suspended the exercise after the two CSs had failed to appear before them and instead sent their administrative secretaries.

Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot during a past public address Pulse Live Kenya

The two leaders had been summoned after Kericho Senator Aaron Cheruiyot raised concerns over the justification of the processes in regards to the amount of personal information that will be collected from Kenyans.

Cheruiyot in a letter presented to Senate Speaker Ken Lusaka, had pointed out that Matiang’i and Mucheru had to explain in detail the issue surrounding the process.

Mark Mwithaga