If e-procurement works, it'll change things

I usually don’t have many good things to say about the government, but this once, I will break my fast and say something out of kilter.

If—and it’s a big if—the government pulls through with the proposed e-procurement programme, and it works as it should, this will be the biggest achievement this government has made today, and it will deserve praise.

It would change the way procurement is done, reduce corruption, get value for money, and essentially bring more people into a space that has long been guarded like Kamiti Prison by cartels who believe they are the only ones allowed to eat the government cake—with a big fork and knife at that.

In case Finance Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi and his team start feeling a bit cocky from all the praise they are getting from all over the world about this revolutionary platform, let me take them a notch down and review where we currently stand with this monster.

Yes, they have uploaded hundreds of tenders, onboarded tens of thousands of suppliers, and made a lot of noise about how e-procurement is a game changer. And it is.

Yet, four months on, not a single contract has been awarded from this platform. What could be the problem? Let’s start with vested interests.

The Council of Governors went to court (naturally) to have the mandatory use of e-procurement vacated —and it was, at least for the time being. They argued that the system was not working as it should. The Governors and the nefarious characters who are in charge of procurement in the counties would certainly have been the most heavily affected if this platform had worked as it should.

The platform, like any new system is expected to have glitches here and there but that should not mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. We can and should fix it, today. And this brings us to the second challenge: the cartels that have been growing fat from, well, the fat of the land cannot allow food be taken out of their mouths. They will fight tooth and nail to ensure the status quo remains.

The entire e-procurement process works against the cartels that dominate national and county governments, which is why it’s no surprise that the COG went to court. I don’t know a single poor governor in this country, and yet some of them were not exactly swimming in money when they took office. Procurement is where the money is—lots of money.

The vested interests within the procurement processes of both central and county governments are so entrenched that they will do anything to ensure the system does not succeed.

They can throw a spanner in the works just to cause the whole system to crash, so that the status quo remains intact.

From media reports, some of the most lucrative procurements have already been allowed to bypass the e-procurement portal, ostensibly because the system had glitches. Hundreds of roads across the country reverted to the same old corrupt processes of fake tendering.

Someone told me that if you ever see an advertisement for any government-related service (both central and county), don’t even bother applying unless you are on the inside track. The small deals are often closed in seedy bars, while the big ones are sometimes signed at 35,000 feet—over a bottle of 35-year-old cognac and some Cuban cigars. This is not just a metaphor: remember the gentleman (if he can be called so) who sold off the country some years ago by signing shady contracts (on a private jet enroute to Dubai) that brought the nation to its knees? The economy took nearly two decades to stabilise—not to mention to regain its growth trajectory. That man is now at the heart of power—but that’s a story for another day.

The thing is: if only the powers that be can put their foot down and get this thing to work, we will see a totally fundamental change in this country. Let us not just pay lip service but do what we say we are going to do. Otherwise, all we will have been doing is running on the spot.