Economy
MPs push for foreign missions facelift cash
Tuesday August 29 2023
Cabinet Secretary for Foreign & Diaspora Affairs Alfred Mutua. FILE PHOTO | DENNIS ONSONGO | NMG
Parliament has asked the Treasury to provide funds to rehabilitate Kenya’s foreign missions and residences abroad that are in a dilapidated state.
The Committee on Foreign Affairs directed the Treasury to allocate funds and table a report on the plan to upgrade the facilities in the next three months.
Read: Kenya set to open six new foreign missions
Kenya’s diplomatic offices and residences in major cities such as New York, Washington DC and London had also reportedly been run down, fuelling the push to allocate hundreds of millions of shillings to spruce them up.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should prioritise allocating funds in the 2024/25 financial year for the renovation of the ambassador’s residence in Riyadh, which is dilapidated with a swimming pool that had never been operational since it was never completed due to funding hitches,” the committee says in the report tabled before the House.
Kenya bought land and developed the facility in Riyadh in 1983 and the mission is also tasked with spearheading Kenya’s diplomatic touch to the now restive nations of Yemen and Iraq.
Saudi Arabia has emerged as a key source of diaspora remittances to Kenya, with Sh37.78 billion sent last year, according to official data.
There are an estimated 200,000 Kenyan workers in the Gulf nation, with nearly half being domestic workers.
But the Kenyan mission to Riyadh continues to come under increasing spotlight amid high cases of domestic workers mistreated in the Gulf nation.
This is the latest push to spruce up Kenya’s run-down residences of the diplomatic missions abroad, nearly three years after the Treasury revealed similar plans for embassies in the US and the United Kingdom.
In 2019, the Treasury disclosed plans to spend Sh250 million a piece to upgrade the residences and offices of the diplomatic missions in London and Washington D.C. and a further Sh200 million for the mission in New York.
The dilapidated facilities had forced some of the diplomats to rent homes in some of the world’s pricey cities as residences built by taxpayers fall apart due to neglect, the Auditor-General revealed in a recent report.
Read: Closing foreign missions makes economic sense
The call to spruce up the Riyadh mission’s residence comes amid a push to change from leasing of space to property purchase as rental costs for embassies and consulates shoot to billions of shillings, crowding out other critical items for the missions.
