The Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa) is on the spotlight yet again after the United Nation-backed Global Fund revealed that goods sent to the authority vanished from warehouses under mysterious circumstances.
In the latest scandal, 1.1 million condoms, 908,000 mosquito nets and tuberculosis drugs worth Sh10 million have gone missing.
According to the Global Fund, a Switzerland-based organization that funds governments to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, the supplies are suspected of being stolen and resold to private chemists.
“Kemsa has poor internal controls on warehousing and inventory management resulting in 16 per cent differences in batch numbers verified and discrepancies of 908,000 long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) between actual and expected stock balances,” read the Global Fund’s report.
The national drugs agency also overstated the value of medicines by Sh640 million, according to the organization’s audit.
Further, some of the drugs which were bought by cash from Global Fund expired despite there being a shortage in government hospitals across the country.
The Global Fund’s anti-graft unit Office of the Inspector General has called for a further investigation into Kemsa dealings, a move that could put the Fund’s Sh50.6 billion funding to Kenya at risk.
The Fund – whose principal donors are the US, France, Germany and Japan – has disbursed over Sh150 billion to Kenya since 2003 to help fight diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS and the recent Covid-19.
