Kenya's war on corruption may stall following bribery allegations against members of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC), and infighting at the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

Things came to a head last week when PAC chairman Ababu Namwamba, at a hearing before the National Assembly’s Powers and Privileges Committee, accused his colleagues of colluding with “powerful forces in the government” to alter investigative reports critical of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration. 

He said there was “a perfect point of confluence” between political rivals from his own Orange Democratic Movement, where he is the secretary-general, and “Jubilee interests of killing oversight in the National Assembly.”

The result, he said, was a crippled PAC with an “irreparably damaged image.”

Mr Namwamba accused senior bureaucrats and influential figures in the ruling Jubilee coalition of attempting to sabotage the committee’s work on three inquiries.

The investigations are on confidential expenditures in the Office of the President (OP) between 2012 and 2013, expenditures by the Judiciary, and procurement of five sets of electoral equipment by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission in the run-up to the 2013 polls.

Mr Namwamba presented an audio recording in which PAC members allegedly confirm that they received a $16,350 bribe from former interior principal secretary Mutea Iringo to remove his name from a report on how the OP spent $31.6 million. Mr Iringo and the adversely mentioned members have both denied the claims.

According to Mr Namwamba, the PAC members were to share the money among themselves and ensure that anything adverse to Mr Iringo would be expunged from the committee’s final report.

“That their evil scheme failed has upset them,” said Mr Namwamba in a letter to National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi, which he submitted at the hearing as part of his evidence.

Meanwhile, at the EACC, infighting among the top management is threatening to compromise investigations into the Anglo Leasing scandal that shook former president Mwai Kibaki’s government in 2004.

The anti-corruption body had just begun prosecuting high-profile suspects in the procurement scandal when claims emerged that some officials were secretly meeting with the accused people to extort money or favours from them. 

Commission chairman Mumo Matemu and chief executive officer Halakhe Waqo were at loggerheads over a unilateral decision by the chairman to suspend the deputy CEO for technical services, Michael Mubea. Mr Mubea was later reinstated by Mr Waqo.

Last year, two EACC commissioners petitioned the president to have Mumo Matemu removed from office for what they said was “lack of vision” and “integrity.”