Until Tuesday’s launch of new coins, the remaking of Kenya’s currency in line with the 2010 Constitution had been long in coming.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the constitutional requirement is the demand that our currency cannot bear the image of an individual, alive or dead.
The provision was made in a quest to eliminate the deification of presidents with the imposition of their images on national currency – which then became part of intense competition for the presidency.
With the new coins in circulation, Kenyans can only hope that new currency notes will follow with speed, given that their circulation is already way beyond the time frame set in the Constitution.
For the record, UK security printing firm De La Rue has already been paid for the job even as the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) chooses to keep the country in the dark on the timelines.
This unfortunately is a continuation of a trend that began when former president Mwai Kibaki came to power in 2003 and nullified a long-term contract De La Rue had signed with the Moi government just days before the 2002 elections. Interestingly, the UK firm has continued to print Kenyan currency with little information on cost and quantities —a perfect situation for rent seekers.
This is why we must continue to ask the CBK to make public who has minted the new coins and at what cost. This would enable the taxpayers, who are the real financiers of this project, to make comparisons with other jurisdictions and make a judgment as to whether they got value for money.
The CBK must stay alive to the public’s right to know and stop treating this as some classified information in its hands. The bottomline is that the CBK is a public institution whose actions and transactions such as this need to be made public as a matter of procedure, not with prompting.
We take this early opportunity to remind the CBK that it is, as a matter of fact, required to routinely publish details of any tenders it awards on the government’s procurement portal. It has certainly not complied on the minting of coins and on the printing of new notes and is therefore is in breach of the Executive Order that established that procedure.
Our focus on this particular tender arises from our belief that as the manager of our monetary affairs, it should strive for the highest level of transparency in matters tendering. And it is at times like this that such a commitment must be demonstrated.
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