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Kenya is headed for a diplomatic tiff with the Italian government over the Lugi Brogoli Malindi Space Centre after it emerged that the government is considering pulling out of the bilateral agreement that paved the way for the setting up of the facility.

Defence Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale told the National Assembly’s Implementation Committee on Thursday that he had already briefed President William Ruto on the matter and is currently preparing a Cabinet memo on the government’s intention to terminate the agreement with the Italian government which has operated the facility for the last 60 years.

“The land they have belongs to us and we know how to take it from them but we have said that Parliament must be involved in the event we exit the agreement and that is why we are here. As of now we have sent a signal to them because we have already briefed the Commander-in-Chief about this, we will also prepare a Cabinet memo with a clause to exit with the blessing of this committee.”

Duale (pictured) told the MPs that he will not be attending a joint inter-ministerial meeting in Rome tomorrow as the Italian government had declined to heed their demands that would have seen Kenya benefit from the proceeds of the facility.

The CS further told the MPs that the Italian government had declined to act on subsequent letters that he and his Principal Secretary Patrick Mariru had written to the Italian Minister of Defence to express the government’s discontent over the agreement but this has not been acted upon.

According to him, despite the government on June 15 June sending a delegation headed by the Mariru to attend the 2nd Joint Steering Committee to address issues around the implementation of the Agreement, despite the meeting arriving at a raft of Resolutions and Recommendations to the Joint Council of Ministers the Italian Counterparts declined to append their signature to the joint resolutions, preferring instead to table a watered-down version, with the bulk of Kenya demands omitted.

In his presentation before the committee, Duale said the current activities at the Malindi Space Centre were exclusively benefitting Italy through the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and its Western partner agencies through tracking, telemetry and command services, and provision of space science and astronomical data to the Western science community at the expense of Kenya.

He said: “Kenya is yet to see significant benefits of this agreement either local or national despite it’s existence for the last and 60 years. The centre is only benefiting the Italian government. The Italian side has made only token fulfillment on select obligations while avoiding the substantive ones.