Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah has filed a petition to stop the Ministry of Health from rolling out the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF) due to the lack of legislation to operationalize the fund.

In their petition under a Certificate of Urgency, Omtatah, together with Eliud Matindi and Magare Gikenyi, claim that the subsidiary legislation to operationalize the Social Health Insurance Act is not in place.

Therefore, the petitioners are seeking court orders to render the implementation of the SHIF unconstitutional.

Similarly, they seek orders to suspend and later quash the government's decision to contract Safaricom to provide the Integrated Healthcare Information Technology System for Universal Health Care (UHC).

“The petitioners have attached to their petition highly classified documents which expose the entire fraud scheme between corrupt government operatives and highly connected wheeler dealers in the Safaricom Consortium.”

“The secretive documents expose the contract between the Government of Kenya and the Safaricom Consortium to be a vicious fraud scheme deliberately designed to steal colossal amounts of money from the SHIF and/or from the Consolidated Fund, in the event contributions to the fund fail to raise the contract billions.”

Parliament’s Health Committee cleared the scheme on Monday, stating that its queries regarding the multi-billion health digitization project had been addressed.

This is after uncertainty emerged over its rollout following gaps in the Means Testing Instrument (MTI), which determines the annual premium contribution for informal sector households.

The National Assembly Health Committee raised issues with the accuracy of the MTI system following revelations that a total sample size of 2000 Kenyans in the informal sector were subjected to the test across the eight counties.

“We conducted the Means Testing Instrument in eight counties and the data that we have is accurate and we assure you we will not have the same issues we are facing in the education sector,” acting chairman of Social Health Authority Abdi Mohammed.