A Nakuru court has brought to a close the long-running criminal case surrounding the Uasin Gishu overseas education scholarship programme, acquitting Senator Jackson Mandago and his two co-accused after finding that the prosecution failed to prove the allegations brought against them.
The court ruled that the evidence presented during the trial did not justify placing the accused on their defence.
The senior principal magistrate on Thursday dismissed all charges facing Mandago, Joshua Lelei and Meshack Rono, saying the prosecution had not established a prima facie case despite calling 138 witnesses throughout the proceedings.
“The prosecution has failed to establish a prima facie case in any of the charges herein. It shall be of no use to put them to their defence as that shall mean shifting the onus of proving their innocence to them,” said the magistrate.
Mandago was arrested in March 2023 and later charged alongside Lelei and Rono over the establishment and management of the Uasin Gishu Overseas Education Scholarship Programme.
The three faced 10 counts, including conspiracy to commit a felony, stealing, abuse of office and forgery.
According to the charge sheet, they were accused of conspiring to misappropriate Sh1.1 billion from a KCB account operated under the Uasin Gishu Education Trust Fund, where money had been deposited to pay tuition fees for students admitted to universities through the scholarship programme.
Mandago also faced two counts of abuse of office after prosecutors accused him of signing Memorandums of Understanding with universities in Finland and Canada on behalf of the county government without approval from the county assembly.
He was further accused of assigning county employees to work for what the prosecution described as a private entity while they remained on the county payroll.
Lelei and Rono were separately charged with forging a Declaration of Trust document with intent to defraud. They also faced three counts of allegedly stealing millions of shillings from the trust fund.
In its decision, the court ruled that the prosecution failed to prove that the accused persons had agreed to steal money from the trust account.
The magistrate observed that none of the accused were signatories to the account and therefore the claim that they had planned to misappropriate Sh1.1 billion was not supported by the evidence presented.
The court also found that Mandago openly signed the agreements with the universities in Finland and Canada, saying there was nothing to show that the process had been carried out secretly.
It further ruled that prosecutors had failed to demonstrate that Mandago acted outside his authority or that the county government suffered any harm from the agreements.
“The prosecution has not shown how the signing of the MoU was prejudicial to the county,” said the court.
The magistrate also questioned the figure of Sh1.1 billion cited in the charges, noting that the investigating officer did not explain how the amount had been arrived at.
The court pointed out that the KCB bank manager who testified during the trial had denied that such an amount had ever been handled through the trust account.
On the abuse of office charges, the court ruled that there was no evidence showing county staff had been deployed to manage a private entity.
Instead, it found that the scholarship programme operated under the Department of Youth, Education and Sports and was run by officers from that department.
The court also dismissed the stealing charges against Lelei and Rono after finding no evidence linking money withdrawn from the trust account to their personal accounts.
“I hereby dismiss all the charges against the accused persons pursuant to Section 210 of the Criminal Procedure Code and consequently acquit all of them of the charges of conspiracy to commit a felony, stealing, abuse of office and forgery,” stated the magistrate.
Speaking after the ruling, Mandago said politics had derailed a programme that had opened education opportunities for many young people from Uasin Gishu County.
“As we are speaking, there are 350 beneficiaries of the programme who are living their dreams because of it. But the number could be 2,000 now if not for politics,” he said.
He urged Governor Jonathan Bii Chelilim to revive the programme to allow more students to benefit from overseas education opportunities