Health Cabinet Secretary Susan Nakhumicha yesterday accused suspended Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) boss Terry Ramadhani of frustrating her efforts to clean up the graft mess at the drugs supply agency.

The CS’ revelations — which detailed how her efforts to stop a deliberate plan to divert public money were thwarted by senior managers — appeared to suggest that the suspended Kemsa board and bosses were taking instructions from elsewhere other than the ministry.

Nakhumicha told a gathering that witnessed the launch of a new Ethics and Anti Corruption Commission (EACC) study on graft in the health sector that Ramadhani defied her suggestions that pre-qualification of tenders be done through the information management system used by government agencies.

“In my few days in office, I told the CEO Kemsa that from today I want to see pre-qualification of tenders being done through an Information Management System, IMS, and I was clear that the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal (PPOA) Act does not allow us to do it the way it was being done,” she said.

Going forward — and with Ramadhani out of the way for the time being — the CS said prequalification of all tenders would be done through IMS.

“I am glad that we are going to do it now,” she said, and detailed how a back and forth with the suspended CEO on the procurement of the mosquito nets raised the red alert on the latest scandal to rock the drugs supply agency.

The scandal led to the firing of the entire board and the suspension of seven senior managers earlier this week.

And on Tuesday, two new Principal Secretaries were deployed to the Health ministry, one to replace Josphine Mburu, who was fired, and the other to take over from Peter Tum, who was transferred to the Sports Ministry.

New board

The two new PSs are Harry Kimtai, who moves to Medical Services, and Mary Muthoni, who takes over at Public Health.

Two years ago, the country’s health equipment and drugs supplier was in the centre of a storm when billions of shillings were diverted through dubious supply tenders for Covid-19 medical equipment.

And when Ramadhani came into the institution with a new board, it was widely believed that scandals would be banished, only for a new one to surface this month, this time involving the supply of mosquito nets worth Sh4 billion.

Interestingly, according to the CS, when the alert of the new scandal was being raised by the Global Fund, early that morning she had written to the EACC chief executive, Twalib Mbarak, asking him to investigate Kemsa bosses.

“Just to let you know how corruption fights back, on Monday morning I reached out to Twalib to find out whether he had received my letter, and to my surprise, he had not but assured me that his detectives had already swung into action,” she revealed.

The CS detailed how she confronted Ramadhani on the mosquito nets scandal after seeing numerous newspaper advertisements for procurement of nets.

“After the tender was advertised, just before it closed, there was another newspaper advert indicating it had been extended. A few days later there was another advert that it had been terminated and the process was going to start a fresh,” she revealed, saying that at that point she noticed that there was a problem.

“I asked the CEO to let me know why we were behaving in the way we did in the newspapers as if we didn’t know what we were doing,” she said, indicating that an altercation could have taken precedence.

“You cannot be advertising today, the following day you are extending, and the day after you are terminating, and the following day you are reverting back to where we began,” the CS said she reprimanded the suspended chief executive.

Procurement process

In response, the CS claimed, Ramadhani told her she had received instructions for the change of specifications.

“And when I found out that indeed there were instructions, I spoke to the Global Fund personally and asked what the specifications of the nets were and they confirmed to me that we revert to the original specifications,” she said.

And at that juncture she told the chief executive to proceed with the Global Fund instructions.

“I however, need to clarify that as part of this procurement process, after the evaluations are done, the report is given then to the director in charge of procurement at Kemsa for him to give his opinion, then it goes to Global Fund, but there was a misstep that this report was first submitted directly to Global Fund,” she said.