War on corruption: It’s time Kenya outsourced MPs’, ministers’ services

The National Assembly today voted unanimously for the Bill to outsource the oversight and representative role of Parliament to leading international audit firm CWP.

The same Bill also outsources the role of government ministries to Dineshco, a business processing outsourcing company in Madras, India.

The extraordinary Bill was the brainchild of the MP for a previously unheard of constituency in Kwale county, long known to have harboured desires for secession anyway.

“Since Pwani cannot leave Kenya, the next best thing is for the government to leave us, and for us parliamentarians to leave ourselves,” said the diminutive and often vituperative MP.

The quotation above sounds like a ridiculous headline story in a freakish nightmare movie. But is it preposterous to think of outsourcing as the solution to the chasmic corruption in the executive and the cataclysmic rent seeking in the institution that is supposed to keep the executive in check, namely Parliament?

Think about it for a River Road minute. We find a company that is willing to run our government ministries and ensure that efficient service delivery is procured for the ultimate customer: the mwananchi. We pay the company a percentage of the national budget.

The company then delivers proficient services in health, education, tourism, environment etc; procuring supplies from the least cost provider and leveraging on economies of scale just from ordering in bulk across the ministries.

We throw out the Cabinet Secretaries, Principal Secretaries and the entire civil service. We will have a President who will be the head of the country in as much as the non-executive chairman of a private sector corporate is the ceremonial head of the institution.

The President is actively encouraged to visit schools and hospitals and take appropriate kissing baby pictures for the media.

We then turn our attention to Parliament. We throw them all out. We hire an audit firm to provide monitoring and oversight over the company running the executive.

We keep 47 senators who will represent the counties and meet the audit firm once a quarter to receive a report on what the company running the executive is doing.

They only engage through the auditors. We encourage the senators to visit schools and hospitals in their counties and take appropriate kissing baby pictures for the media.

Kenya has now hard-wired corruption both in its institutions and in its collective DNA. We have to reboot.

But we have to outsource management of our institutions away while we reboot. The idea of outsourcing everything, while extreme, has been undertaken in smaller measures elsewhere.

The Financial Times, in its March 23, 2015, edition ran a story headlined: UK Government Outsourcing Raises Questions Over Pay. It turns out that the coalition government in the UK has outsourced 88 billion pounds (Sh12 trillion) worth of contracts to the private sector.

The Financial Times also reports that more than 2,800 top-grade engineers — who service military equipment including aircraft at the Defence Ministry’s Defence Support Group — are expected to lose the right to their civil service terms on April 1 after the agency was sold for 140 million pounds (Sh19 billion) to the outsourcing company, Babcock.

The FT article also cites the example of the Lincolnshire Police Force where the G4S security company manages a number of back office functions.

G4S staff now supports police officers in the logistics and administration surrounding arrests, which frees up more expensive police resources to remain in front line roles.

A November 2014 article in The Economist also sheds some light on government outsourcing. Titled Government Outsourcing: Nobody said it was Easy, the article mentions that the two big private-prison firms in the US, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, have delighted shareholders with an average annualised return since 2004 of 18.5 per cent.

The main cause is America’s bloated justice system, which locks up more people than in other rich countries.

An American online magazine, published by GOVERNING, ran an interesting article on the pros and cons of privatising government functions in December 2010. An interesting excerpt is as follows: “This past March, for example, New Jersey Gov Chris Christie created the state Privatisation Task Force to review privatisation opportunities within state government and identify barriers.’’

Spectacular failures

In its research, the task force not only identified estimated annual savings from privatisation totalling more than $210 million (Sh19 billion), but also found several examples of successful efforts in other states.

As former mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Gov Ed Rendell saved $275 million (Sh25 billion) by privatising 49 city services. Chicago has privatised more than 40 city services. Since 2005, it has generated more than $3 billion (Sh273 billion) in upfront payments from private-sector leases of city assets.

Sterile philosophical debates about ‘public versus private’ are often detached from the day-to-day world of public management, the New Jersey Privatisation Task Force reported.

“Over the last several decades, in governments at all levels throughout the world, the public sector’s role has increasingly evolved from direct service provider to that of an indirect provider or broker of services; governments are relying far more on networks of public, private and nonprofit organisations to deliver services.”

The report took careful note of another key factor: The states most successful in privatisation created a permanent, centralised entity to manage and oversee the operation, from project analysis and vendor selection to contracting and procurement.

All these stories are of course ringed by spectacular failures as in any industry. But they demonstrate a willingness to look externally for solutions when no internal ones are forthcoming or viable.

We are collectively sick as a nation, perhaps it’s time to give others a chance to cure us from the corruption malaise that bedevils us.

[email protected] | Twitter: @carolmusyoka