Public-private deals should feed innovation and growth

As the world population goes past seven billion people, imagine the key to your existence has been outsourced to a third party with the powers to extract lifetime value by leveraging your data for profit.

This is justifiable until it is mentioned the third party is not local, creating a slew of issues that should concern everyone in government and private sector.

Last week there was talk of a public-private partnership by Kenya Citizens and Foreign Nationals Management Service, under the Ministry of Interior dubbed Umoja Kenya and a company of Israeli origin that was not mentioned.

The value of the PPP was pegged at Sh9 billion with the government already reaching out to private entities to form anchor clients with a projected Sh25 billion payday.

The value of a single source of truth from a sanitised database of users is not lost on the private sector. Everyone jealously guards their hard-earned consumer databases; just look at the mobile network operators, banks and large retailers.

The issue is we have missed the point by a mile by working towards engaging a foreign entity.

The National ICT Masterplan and Vision 2030 have key deliverables that should form the government’s key performance indicators.

Some of the benefits include the creation of 180,000 direct jobs, 10 locally built and successfully commercialised ICT platforms, 55 medium to large ICT companies of multinational status, and the retention of at least 60 per cent of revenue from ICT IPs.

KITOS the trade association representing Kenyan Information Technology Enabled Service (ITeS) member businesses with a core purpose of being the industry catalyst for Kenyan ITeS entrepreneurs and companies is fully cognizant of the capabilities of its membership to partner with government on such and many other PPPs and surpass service delivery expectations.

As local and citizen contractors, we do have vested interests in this as Kenyans and understand our needs and nuances.

Supported by the provisions in the Constitution on local procurement and a default setting of nationalistic pride, we must realise that citizen data is a core national asset and we must look at adding value from within our borders.

Our birthright

We have local capacity across all fronts to enter into a public private partnerships that will realise this and many other projects in sustainable ways that grow our national intellectual property base.

It should also enable us to meet many Vision 2030 milestones and, most importantly, power our local companies to be truly global as the pedigree imbued from undertaking the project successfully will open doors to creating truly exportable value from our ICT, knowledge and service-based industries.

We must be the true and sole custodians in the creation of our national single source of truth; anything less will be akin to peddling our birthright and sovereignty.

Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic | Twitter - @mbuguanjihia