Kiambu governor Kimani Wamatangi is a man under siege, for the umpteenth time.
A major political storm is brewing, and at the eye of it all stands Wamatangi, a man who sees himself as a reformer with his mantra being, “Making Kiambu Great Again.”
The battleground is a sophisticated digital system, namely the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, an automated revenue collection tool that Wamatangi hails as his greatest innovation.
This as his critics and political rivals dismiss the efficient revenue collection tool as a conduit for graft.
For months, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) has been circling, launching a KES 230 million investigation into the contract.
Ultimately, the anti-corruption body secured court orders that blocked key county government payments and crippled the system’s operations.
The commission’s actions, which included a dramatic raid on the governor’s home, were, in their view, a necessary step to halt potential corruption.
However, Wamatangi looked at the EACC’s move not as a fight against graft, but as a calculated, politically motivated plot to paralyze his administration.
He sees the hands of unseen political enemies, rivals from within his own UDA party, who he claims are furious that his reforms had stopped the “looting of county funds” that was previously commonplace.
Wamatangi fiercely defends his ERP system, terming it as a watertight methodology of protecting public resources.
”It’s foolhardy and illogical that the very system which had seen the county’s own-source revenue double from KES 2.9 billion to a record KES 5.4 billion could be the subject of a genuine graft probe,” argues Wamatangi.
This revenue jump was the system’s proof of concept, his shield against accusations of misappropriation of funds.
”It is the system that replaced the porous, privately owned ones that facilitated theft,” he maintained.
Governor Wamatangi paints himself as a victim of a witch-hunt led by those who profited from the old, inefficient ways.
The battle, which has since moved from the courthouse to the court of public opinion, has openly exposed the politicians fighting Wamatangi.
It’s an open secret that Thika MP Alice Ng’ang’a, reinforced by the Leader of Majority Kimani Ichung’wa alongside a host of Kiambu Members of Parliament, with blessings from senior national leaders, are burning the midnight oil planning how to oust the governor.
”They are fighting me because I said no to their appetite for land grabbing, the Delmonte one being one of their targets. They also wanted me to award them lucrative tenders, demanding that their costs be tripled, but I said no,” Wamatangi told a public gathering at Ngarariga, Limuru recently.
