Anybody who has analysed this country Kenya closely will have concluded that corruption is one of our biggest problems and hinderance to development. It does not choose tribe, religion or which administration is governing, as long as there is corruption anywhere things must go down south and the results are costly especially to humanity. Crime goes up, murders due to disagreements in shoddy deals, citizens lack essential govt services and goods like medicine, economy tanks because of hardship of doing business resulting in job/income loses and the inevitable low purchasing power and poor quality of life. Majority lack because of a few greedy individuals and the situation soon becomes that of 10 millionaires and 10 million paupers. Recipe for disaster. However, what is this corruption?
Corruption as we knew it back then was that of toa kitu kidogo here and there. The police kind of corruption of toa mia mbili, bribe someone something small to get service in a govt office etc etc Before Kibaki during Moi’s tenure and before the Kenyan economy was not that large and was in very few peoples hands. Govt revenue was not much comparatively due to poor tax collection that was mainly manual. The populate was much poorer, vehicle ownership minimal, house ownership at very low rates etc. Big corruption was for big people and mostly consisted of outright theft of public funds and resources. Influential people would grab public land for own use. Political leaders would degazette public forests and dish out land to loyalists. The president would dish out money left right and centre for political posturing, money which was outright public taxes diverted at his whims (Ruto got used to this).
However, at some point, corruption metamorphosized into business which became even harder to track and fight. Here the line between business and corruption got thinner and blurred, but the transactions grew bigger, and corruption became mega and almost easier to perpetrate. Infact it came even closer home with the advent of devolution. Procurement corruption is rife at the counties. Also govt revenue grew mostly due to automation/computerization. For example we had things like itax, ifmis and simba systems in place which greatly reduced tax cheats, made recording and monitoring easier in tax administration. However, you now could be ‘legally’ corrupt as you were doing business with the govt. You were now reffered to as a tenderprenuer. How you got deals depended on who you know, how connected you are. But in all this there is a very important step called procurement.
Whenever govt or its entities want to buy goods or services, there is a procurement procedure to be followed. This entails identifying the qualifying vendors who will supply quality at minimal cost after a competitive bidding process. Other requirements are whether the vendor is legally registered, has relevant professional qualifications, permits and licences. Whether they are tax compliant, whether they have the financial muscle to supply etc etc. Anywhere you have heard where the public has been duped and public money stolen, it all starts with the procurement process being compromised. Instead of it being used to identify the correct suppliers, it is used to lock out qualifying candidates and rewarding corrupt unsuitable/unqualified ones who share the loot with the administration, and the project cost is inflated so that everyone in the deal gets something. Qualified low bidders are eliminated on technicalities to chose the high bidders so that the cake for looters is bigger all this at the expense of the tax payer.
Procurement by the way is a professional career complete with a professional body. But in Kenya, they seem to be laid back, quiet against misuse of their profession and supports archaic procurement procedures that encourage corrupt practices. If you have tendered for public projects and supplies in Kenya, you will notice that the tender documents are always pretty large. Those bound documents contain a myriad of useless information that is mostly unverifiable but mandatory nontheless. Information like audited accounts for the last three years. Anybody will tell you that they go to the nearest cyber, have some fake accounts typed and printed then make some auditors stamp and there you go, they can show financial capability. Requirements like bank statements, again fakedvin river road, professional qualifications and manpower, they put in sove unverifiable cv’s, machinery, fake log books etc etc The document ends up being voluminous but with very useless information. And it even has to be serialized by hand. A whole 1000 pages of it. Ofcourse no one reads it in the prequalification process as the important part in all that document is the quote or BQ if you like.
My argument is this, prequalification must be made simple, reliable, verifiable and computerized as much as possible. If you claim to be a large supplier, rather than ask you for fake audited accounts, why not just look at your tax records, how much tax did you remit last year on that massive turnover you are boasting about, how much paye did you remit when you claim to have all those professional expertise employees. This just one verifiable parameter. We do not need physical voluminous tender documents that contain useless information and only encourage corruption. The professional body should be able to advice govt of modern ways of handling procurement that are electronic, easy and most importantly open.