New Govt Portal to Process All Public Tenders – Gamechanger or Liability?

The link to the National Council for Persons with Disability (NCPWD) will enable easy verification of tenders allocated under programs which ensure People With Disabilities (PWDs) are guaranteed a share of opportunities to supply counties and the national government.

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But the jury remains out on whether the introduction of the e-procurement system will be able to put a dent in the country’s high-powered corruption and mismanagement of public funds. Public confidence, in particular, has undoubtedly been eroded by the failure of other public finance digital systems including IFMIS to live up to promises of delivering greater transparency.

IFMIS, and its deliberate misuse and manipulation, has been at the center of numerous corruption scandal investigations since its introduction.

About Ksh11 billion was spent to set up IFMIS, which is essentially used to pay for services delivered to government agencies and disburse money to the 47 counties. Reports from the Auditor General have however unearthed numerous loopholes in the system that have helped facilitate loss of public funds.

For instance, unauthorized users have been able to easily gain access to the system as passwords did not expire and there were multiple duplicate vendor identities – which enabled some suppliers to get paid multiple times.

Some, including former ICT PS Bitange Ndemo who currently teaches at the University of Nairobi (UoN) School of Business, have speculated that such loopholes and oversights are deliberately built-into the systems to facilitate corruption despite the promise of transparency.

“ÏFMIS should have been in the cloud. The easy human intervention when one just needs to switch it off once every quarter to facilitate payments for orders outside the budget is something very deliberate,” Ndemo stated in 2019 while commenting on the Auditor-General’s report. “The beautiful thing about going digital is that the theft can be traced, digital footprints are not easy to erase,” he added.

Notably, the new e-procurement system will get rid of much of the paperwork which currently characterizes the procurement process in government.

But as to whether it will help stamp out corruption? Only time will tell.

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