Timothy Karanja Njoroge now fully appreciates the harrowing experiences of the thousands of private and public sector employees who conscientiously refuse to engage in corruption within their employment setups. We begin our serialization with this article from a leaked trove of over 8GB’s of data, availed exclusively to Cyprian Nyakundi, currently being analyzed by a special team of forensic analysts.
For every lot of CEOs and Senior managers of Government corporations hauled before the Anti-Corruption Court every month, there are dozens of nameless, faceless spanner boys behind the scenes, who understand the systems intimately and are either coerced or willingly complicit in assisting their bosses to rip-off Kenyans of BILLIONS.
The National Oil Corporation of Kenya is a fully integrated State Corporation involved in all aspects of the petroleum supply chain covering the upstream oil and gas exploration, midstream petroleum infrastructure development and downstream marketing of petroleum products.
As an employee of National Oil Corporation of Kenya (NOCK), he was reshuffled, demoted and his job advertised when he refused to accede to demands by the senior management to evaluate a tender document for a Ksh. 101million system audit.
Timothy is an IT man and had been for the last 18 years, he is probably a geek, wearing glasses, punctual and dedicated.
His problems began with the entry of a company by the name PENTA GLOBAL, which had initially been drafted by NOCK to audit their ERP Core system (Enterprise Resource System allow the organization to automate most business and administration tasks).
The NOCK ERP was supposedly experiencing systemic weaknesses which allowed fraud and the theft of “white products” (liquefied petroleum gas (cooking gas), petrol, kerosene, and diesel ) within the depots.
PENTA GLOBAL had initially been brought in to mitigate the outright theft and plunder at the National Oil Terminal and to clear stock issues, which the system showed amounted to a Ksh. 1.4 Billion deficit.
In hindsight, the entire system re-engineering plan was a massive flop of calculated failure, which we believe that the system upgrade actually allowed for the recent looting of white products at the National Oil Terminal in cahoots with employees and senior management of the Kenya Pipeline Corporation.
Timothy recommended for the NOC Oracle ERP system in his memo that NOCK simply upgrade the system to Oracle Fusion, which is the Oracle’s latest version, and would have mitigated most of the functionalities needed for automation.
At NOCK, how the physical looting of white products and their removal from the premises became an entirely system issue is not clear, though it was the pretext of such theft that occasioned the engagement of PENTA GLOBAL to carry out an audit of the ERP system. Needless to say, ERP system don’t steal, it is people who do!
A conscience is a terrible thing in Kenyan lootocracy, and the like of Timothy would lose out on a lifetime of dedicated service because of it.
The PENTA GLOBAL tender got awarded with a predetermined amount, over and above a three year support program built into it. As schemed in the internal NOCK tender evaluation, it was the only company that went through up-to the financial evaluation so that they are seen as the only qualified bidders. (Reminds us of the chopper riding NHIF receptionist, doesn’t it?)
Yet according to the ERP vendor (Oracle) standards, re-engineering should be done by Platinum or Gold partners. PENTA GLOBAL was a mere Silver partner of Oracle Corporation. They should not have passed the technical evaluation and this alone proves just how politically wired they really are.
Once the audit had been completed, and in flagrant abuse of any known norms in the rational World of business or NOCKs own internal system safeguards, the same company was then engaged to carry out an overhaul of this Oracle ERP Core system, which as you may be guessing, didn’t really have any anomalies to warrant this overhaul.
It was probably the guys in the IT department who thought, “why should it only be the guys in Engineering who are enjoying looting the company…na pesa sio ya mama zetu..”
However, and as these things normally, the tender to audit the system was granted to PENTA GLOBAL for a sum of 2,650,000/-.
The problem with corruption is that it loves familiarity and almost always, the lightning strikes the same place twice.
After PENTA GLOBAL had given in its confidential report on the weaknesses in the Oracle ERP system at NOCK, a meeting of the board of management was convinced and approved the improvement and upgrade of the same system.
This where it starts to get dicey, the same company that did the audit would now be allowed to carry out a re-engineering of the system. It a lot like the accounts department of a corporation also being allowed to audit its own draft account, how can they see their own audit weaknesses? Isnt this a classic case of “Nyani haoni kundule…?”
However, things got a bit even more murky when the NOCK management led by the then acting CEO Mary Jane Mwangi, awarded the contract for the upgrade of the Oracle ERP to PENTA GLOBAL for the colossal sum of Ksh. 101million.
The purchase requisition for the 101 million was effected way before the actual tender was ever done, making this entire scheme a blatant illegality and highly probable abuse of office, theft of public funds and a raft of many other procurement related offences.
However, documents in our possession indicate that NOCK would incur much more in this project, by paying the 101 million inclusive of taxes and an additional 24.6 million annually in post upgrade support service.
All these costs were incurred without having been factored into the company budget or been pre-planned procurement plan.
To get around this little hiccup, NOCK hired a mercenary procurement expert to assist bypass the system protocols, whose name is DOMITILA WANZILA MUVANYA.
So valuable was this experts’ contribution to the procurement bypass of the company protocols that they were paid a whopping 10.8 million (split into 2.16m per quarter).
To draw you a clearer picture and show you just how this small segment of the company allows for crazy looting of taxpayer money, see the amounts.
Ksh. 101 million plus 24.6m per annum for 3 years and an additional 10.8 m for the procurement consultancy which totals in excess of ksh. 185 million.
Remember too that NOCK is not your run-of-the-mill parastatal, it is a crazily strategic organization that should bring stability to our crucial energy sector.
Why is such a strategic asset now being looted with this level of impunity, and is the Board aware of the activities of the CEO MaryJane Mwangi? Surely she cannot be incurring these kinds of expenditure without the board approval and acquiescence…
The Chairman of the Board is none other than Kibuga “Kibby” Kareithi, a bosom friend to President Uhuru Kenyatta and former CEO of the Nairobi Securities Exchange. His father was the former Head of Civil Service in the Kenyatta and Moi errors – Godfrey Kareithi. He is well known as Muhoho Kenyatta’s sycophant who has been a director of various Kenyatta Companies including MediaMax. He is definitely the lineman to the powerful people who are plundering the parastatal.
Can these things really be going on under the very nose of such a Chairman, whose pedigree is much talked about or is this another Bruce Odhiambo (RIP) who were rewarded by Uhuru Kenyatta to take an opportunity to ALSO loot, so that the Kenyatta family may not be alone in the clouds, with looted billions – they will need companions who will not prick their filthy consciences..
However, for this heist to be pulled off successfully, it required the assistance of the senior managers who oversee the running of the company on a day-to-day basis.
