Nyeri DG Caroline Karugu rushes to court to block impeachment talk
Nyeri Deputy Governor Caroline Karugu addresses participants at a forum for women leaders at the White Rhino hotel in Nyeri County.
Deputy Governor Caroline Karugu wants the Nyeri County Assembly barred from discussing a public petition seeking to impeach her.
In an application filed under a certificate of urgency before the Nyeri Employment and Labour Relations Court, Ms Karugu says that the petition is meant to sabotage a suit she has already filed in court.
According to her, some of the concerns singled out in the petition are set to be discussed in the proceedings of the other suit registered as ELRC 045 of 2021.
In that case, Ms Karugu accuses Nyeri County Secretary Benjamin Gachichio and Governor Mutahi Kahiga, who are listed as the first and second respondents, of withholding her salary, emoluments and allowances since 2019.
The duo is also accused of failing to renew her personal assistant’s contract since 2019, transferring her staff to other departments and locking her office for the whole of 2020.
They are also accused of failing to allocate fuel allowances for her official car and sidelining her from County Executive meetings and programmes.
In the new application filed before the court on October 7, Ms Karugu has enjoined the County Assembly of Nyeri, Speaker John Kaguchia, the Clerk and County government of Nyeri as the third, fourth, fifth and sixth respondents respectively.
She is seeking orders preventing the respondents from tabling and deliberating her impeachment before the County Assembly, as well as making any decision or putting to a vote a motion on the petition.
The document presented before court was taken to the County Assembly by three Nyeri residents: Mr James Muringo, Ms Agnes Wanjiku and Lilian Wambui.
In an affidavit received by the court on Thursday October 7, 2021, Ms Karugu has requested the court to urgently intervene in the matter saying the timing of the public petition is suspicious since it arose after she sued the governor.
According to her, it is meant to frustrate her quest for justice before the court.
“The said document, strangely, does not have a date on when it was prepared but bears a governor’s receipt stamp of September 22, 2021 which coincidentally, is a period after I filed the suit before court,” says Ms Karugu in her affidavit.
If the court does not intervene, the deputy county boss says, the Assembly will go on to discuss the motion even though it lacks substantial grounds to impeach.
“Moreover, I stand to suffer a great prejudice because the County Assembly Standing orders themselves don’t avail me an opportunity to be heard prior to the debate of the public petition being voted on in the floor of the Nyeri County Assembly,” she argues.
She further alleges that the document lacks evidence to support the claims made.
Through her lawyer Harrison Kinyanjui, Ms Karugu wants the court to protect her constitutional rights, citing that they have been violated and stand to be threatened by the respondents.
According to the affidavit, she got to know about the impeachment document after Speaker Kaguchia forwarded a message to her on WhatsApp informing her of the petition before the Assembly.
The petition would later be sent to her by the Clerk of the County Assembly.
In the document, Ms Karugu is accused of absconding official duty by failing to report to work for more than two years in a row and being absent during County Executive Committee meetings despite being a member.
“Therefore, the Deputy Governor cannot convince the people of Nyeri that she is part of the executive decisions made in such meetings for the purposes of guiding the county in its development agenda,” reads the petition.
She is also accused of insubordination to county government projects by failing to adhere to protocol.
According to the residents, Ms Karugu allegedly walks into public meetings after the governor has arrived, thus exposing him to shame and ridicule.
Other accusations are that she has abused her office by assigning an unaccredited driver to drive an official county government vehicle.
The said driver allegedly caused an accident along the Chaka-State lodge road and the accident was reported to Naromoru police station in late January.
“She has also been using the county vehicle to run personal errands,” say the residents in the petition.
The case continues on October 18.
