Centralised advertisements, procurement of ICT goods and services conduit for graft, slows service

In July 2015, the government launched the Government Advertising Agency (GAA) and outlined the agency’s key functions as coordination of government advertising with the benefit of a bird’s eye view, consolidating government advertising budgets in one pool with the aim of standardising the advertising rates and, consolidating media opportunities availed by centralised advertising to satisfy the needs of the end users. The formation of the agency was on the premise that government advertisement had been previously done without proper policy guidelines.

In August 2018, the ICT Ministry was reported to be owing the media close to Sh 2.5 billion, an amount which saw the Director of Public Prosecutions, Noordin Haji, approve the prosecution of 22 suspects implicated in the scandal. The introduction of the GAA has had the effect of slowing down the process of purchasing media space and time. Whereas the accounting officers of the public entities are required to submit to the agency their quarterly advertisement plans, 15 days to the commencement of each quarter for the purposes of planning and budgeting, this has not curbed the delay. There has also been delayed advertisement processing due to lack of budget transparency witnessed in its operations. The budgetary allocation to each public agency for advertisement is not known by the agencies in advance with another challenge being delay in payment of after sale of media space by the GAA to the media houses.

Even before the ink dry up on the GAA scandal, in 2018, the government came up with another drastic policy that centarlised the government procurement for all Information Communication Technology supplies for all ministries and parastatals with Ministry of ICT. It has been reported in one of the dailies that the ICT ministry has identified 25 companies which will supply 41 items across the government. The companies are set to gobble up to 18 billion of the ICT budgets through the supply of the goods and provision of services. An analysis of the implication of this policy shows that it is fraught with legal and economic dangers.

First, it undermines the national values and principles of governance under Article 10 and the Principles of Procurement of goods and services under Article 227(1) of the constitution. Notably, the constitution requires procurement to be done in a fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost- effective manner. This is further complemented by the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act, 2015, whose guiding principles include maximisation of value for money and promotion of local industries. Evidently, while the objective of this policy was stated as enabling the government to procure ICT goods and services at lower rates, the opposite is likely to happen due to limited competition. Further, it has the potential of killing the Small and Medium Enterprises which requires support from the government. Secondly, the policy is likely to promote rent seeking by public officers handling procurement with in the Ministry. Having few officers handling huge amounts of money with the sole discretion of deciding the winners is a recipe for corruption and goes against the government’s anti- corruption efforts.

Third, technology has become part of our lives and is becoming central to service delivery in Kenya. Indeed, according to the Access to Information Act 2016, all public bodies are required to have digitalised their systems by 21st September 2019. Accordingly, when you place an important aspect such as technology in a system which is susceptible to delay, rent seeking and other challenges then service delivery is likely to be affected. Further, a pertinent question can be raised on the extent to which the public was involved in the development of this policy. Fourth, it is worth noting that in coming up with a new policy, one of the principles is usually the mischief that is to be cured or remedied. In this case, if the mischief was inflated cost of goods and services procured or lack of competition or unfairness in the procurement process, can it be said that the centralisation was the cure? The answer to this is obviously in the negative. It is even worrying that the government decided to centralise the procurement of ICT goods and services in spite of the constitutional approach of decentralization of power and resources. Evidently, this policy is counter productive and brings its share of challenges. In the light of the above reasons, there is need to review the policy to bring it to conformity with the Constitution and the various laws in order to promote efficiency, accountability and prudent use of resources.