Webmasters Kenya, the firm contracted by the State to develop and provide technical support for the e-Citizen payment platform, has proposed premium charges for those seeking expedited services.
Webmasters chief executive James Ayugi said the company had already engaged the government on the proposal, which he claimed would help curb extortion of those seeking expedited services.
“To curb corruption, we’ve advised the government to introduce fast-track services. There are people who can pay Sh20,000 to Sh30,000 because they are paying it anyway only for other guys to pocket the money,” he said.
“The government can have fast-track departments across all the agencies whose work is just to fast track premium clients who want to come in, pay top dollar, and get their services almost instantly,” Mr Ayugi added.
Webmasters Kenya provides support services for the government’s e-Citizen platform, which has brought together 22,000 public services that Kenyans can access online.
Most Kenyans use e-Citizen to access to services offered by the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA), such as the applying for driving licences and logbooks, and applications for national identity cards, passports and birth certificates.
AI chatbots
Mr Ayugi also said the company has engaged the government about introducing artificial intelligence (AI) in the delivery of public services, noting that Webmasters is already testing chatbots it has developed and trained on responding to Kenyans seeking some of the services.
“We are currently testing AI chats for support because we are already supporting the (e-Citizen) ecosystem. We have chatbots that will be deployed very soon,” Mr Ayugi said.
He said the chatbots Webmasters has developed are able to answer questions related to generally available information on government “but in future we will have AI reviewers and other tools.”
Webmasters has been operating the e-Citizen platform since it was introduced to the government a decade ago and the platform now offers about 22,000 services across national and county governments.
Audit reports have, however, raised concerns about the government relegating too much influence over the platform to vendors on the systems, with questions over hundreds of millions of shillings paid to the companies remaining unanswered.
E-Citizen director-general Isaac Ochieng’ last week said much of the payments to the vendors included bills that were not paid during the onboarding of services done after the current government came into office.
“We accumulated bills as we were running, including for onboarding of services. We did not pay the developer for onboarding the services, it is now that we are paying for the services,” he said.
Mr Ochieng’ also said that control over e-Citizen remains in the government’s hands, with the Interior Ministry being in charge of services, the Ministry of ICT offering advisory on technology issues, and the Treasury handling revenues generated through e-Citizen.
“When we started we saw some agencies’ revenue collection shoot by 300 to 400 percent. All that money was disappearing. We are projecting that if we can be able to collect every money, we will collect about Sh4 billion daily which will translate to about Sh1.7 trillion annually,” Mr Ochieng’ said.
