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Just how successful has the Commission on Administrative Justice (Office of the Ombudsman) in expending its mandate since inception?
This was one of the questions levelled at the new Commission Chairperson Florence Kajuju during a televised interview last week.
According to Ms Kajuju, the office achieved an 83 per cent success rate in the resolution of cases handled during the tenure of the past chair and current Rarieda MP Otiende Omollo. “By the last count of cases that were registered with us, they were over 300,000 and I have confirmed that over 250,000 cases have been settled,” said Ms Kajuju.
“We’ve been able to settle most of the pension cases that were bought to the Ombudsman. We’ve been able to settle issues about the land where there has been a complaint that does not touch on the NLC but on maladministration and impunity,” she explained.
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A look at the annual reports from the Ombudsman’s office spanning the past seven years, however, paints a mixed bag of successes and failures of the State agency tasked to level the scales of justice in favour of the disenfranchised.
In 2012, the first full operational year since its inception, the commission handled 4,062 complaints and inquiries.
These included 2,440 complaints inherited from its predecessor, the Public Complaints Standing Committee and 1,622 new complaints and inquiries of which 1,398 were resolved and the rest carried forward.
Over the past five years, the commission has seen an unprecedented rise in the number of complaints registered, solved and carried forward. In 2014, the number of cases handled by the Commission shot up from 18,257 the previous year to 86,905 as public awareness and reporting platforms were expanded. Of these, the Ombudsman says 70,806 cases were resolved, with 9,066 carried forward, representing a resolution rate of 60 per cent.
The success rate in settling complaints hit an all-time high of 87 per cent in 2015 where 101,882 cases of the 117,939 were resolved, with 7,038 carried forward. This success rate has, however, been clouded by a 157 per cent cumulative increase in the number of complaints unresolved over the past four years. Last year, complaints carried forward at the commission stood at 18,000, up from 7,038 in 2015.
Ms Kajuju cited low budgetary ceilings and wide capacity gaps in the counties where reporting of complaints is less prolific than in Nairobi County.
The commission is yet to receive budgetary support to operationalise the Access to Information Act signed into law in 2016 as one of the tools citizens can use to probe opaque government policies and projects.
Related Topics
Fact checkerOffice of the OmbudsmanCommission on Administrative JusticeFlorence Kajuju
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