Investments in e-government where safeguards are lacking or institutions are weak is bound to fail and many low-income countries have suffered enormous financial costs due to these failures.
Digital technology has been hailed as the cure for many of the toughest obstacles to high quality government service delivery.
Like many low-income countries, Kenya has invested massively in e-government systems like the tax systems, customs, government financial management as well as digital identification schemes.
But is digital technology the miracle we’d like it to be? There is no doubt that digital technology is presenting major opportunities in the development space but just as giving someone a piece of paper and pen doesn’t make them a bestselling author, installing e-government systems doesn’t guarantee better services.
In fact, government bureaucracies seem to have simply added a digital veneer over existing public sector fraud and corruption.
In 2013 Kenya launched the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS), which cost the taxpayer more than Sh11 billion.
Attached to this system was a promissory note guaranteeing more efficient revenue administration from the central government to county government as well as payments to suppliers thus improve public sector accountability.
A few months later, the promissory note wasn’t bankable. The system was marred by loopholes and was overridden with payments of millions of shillings were made to phony suppliers.
Consequently, the taxpayer lost close to Sh1.6 billion in the infamous National Youth Service scandal and more fraudulent payments have continued to filter through it.
Indeed the system proved to be a cobweb, too strong to catch the weak and too weak to catch the strong.
The question that begs is why the Treasury didn’t order an audit of the system as soon as possible in the interest of the taxpayer.
Instead, more funds were actually allocated to it. According to last year’s budget documents tabled in Parliament, the Treasury set aside Sh7.6 billion for its upgrade with another Sh2.8 billion to install a procure-to -pay system integrator, an IFMIS rollout and support to all parastatals, ministries, departments and agencies of government (MDAs), sub-county offices for 19 parastatals and county governments.
Second is the digitisation of the land registry. When then Land secretary Charity Ngilu launched the project in 2014, she promised that full countrywide automation would be completed by 2016, according to its implementation roadmap.
But two months ago, her successor, Jacob Kaimenyi, was quoted as saying that his ministry requires Sh17 billion to digitise the entire land registration system with the hope for the exercise to be completed in the next five years.
Third is the latest scandal, the eCitizen digital platform through which Kenyans apply for Government to Citizen (G2C) services and pay via mobile money, debit cards, and eCitizen agents. Centralisation of payments and improved revenue collection was the whole rationale behind the programme.
But somehow, the funds collected from the system ended in private bank accounts with Kenyan’s personal data also ending up in private hands.
So is digitisation of government processes and services the new cash cow for “tenderpreneurs” to milk money from public coffers?
Truth is investments in e-government where safeguards are lacking or institutions are weak is bound to fail and many low-income countries have suffered enormous financial costs due to these failures.
Though there is no precise determination of success or failure of e-government systems, various estimates suggest that the precise rate of these projects being unsuccessful is around 30 per cent, with the project abandoned before completion.
Another 50 to 60 per cent are partial failures with significant budget and time overruns and only a limited number of the project objectives achieved. Only fewer than 20 per cent are success stories.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
