Huduma centres, county hospitals, and the lands office are the most corrupt in the public service, a new survey has revealed shedding light on areas where Kenyans suffer most in search for services.
The survey by Public Service Commission (PSC) shows that at Huduma centres, one in every three Kenyans had to pay bribes to get public services.
About a quarter (24.3 percent) of Kenyans were served at county referral hospitals and one in five Kenyans (19.5 percent) at the Ministry of Lands.
The PSC interviewed 3,247 Kenyans who have sought services at different public service offices, out of whom 185 (5.7 percent) indicated that they have experienced corruption at service delivery points while the majority of respondents (83.3 percent) said they had not experienced it.
“The respondents were asked to state whether the institutions where they sought the services were corrupt or not corrupt. When the answer was in the affirmative, they were asked whether bribes were demanded from them or whether they volunteered the bribes,” the PSC report notes.
The findings are an indictment on the public institutions that provide critical services to thousands of Kenyans on a daily basis since corruption affects many aspects of service provision.
Huduma centres, for instance, serve thousands of Kenyans across the country with their model of operation that converges different government services under one roof.
County referral hospitals are also the first port of call for Kenyans whose ailments fall beyond the capacity of dispensaries and other small health facilities, and the lands office is crucial for offering land services such as issuance of title deeds, land transfer services, and other land-related transactions.
Out of the 21 institutions that were evaluated, 15 (71.4 percent) had respondents indicating that they (the institutions) were corrupt.
“The highest percentage of reported corruption was in the Ministry of Lands at 27.9 percent, followed by the Public Trustee (14.3 percent), the National Registration Bureau (12.8 percent), County Commissioner’s Office (11.1 percent), County Referral Hospital Level 4 (9.8 percent), Immigration Offices (8.8 percent), State Department for Social Protection at 8.3 percent, Civil Registration Services (7.6 percent) and County Referral Hospital Level 5 at (7.4 percent),” the survey stated.
The public trustee office, where one of the seven interviewed Kenyans indicated that they had paid bribes to be served, is charged with overseeing identification and collection of assets whose owners have died or gotten mentally unstable, by beneficiaries.
Other agencies with reported cases of corruption include immigration offices, civil registration services, and the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).
The survey noted that while the number of Kenyans indicating to have experienced corruption in public institutions remains few (5.7 percent), the number of institutions involved is almost three-quarters (71.4 percent).
“This means most of the institutions where services were sought had varying levels of corruption,” it says.
The PSC has recommended that affected public institutions document, automate, and migrate their business processes to e-platforms for ease of access by citizens “to reduce bureaucracies, red tape and opportunities for rent-seeking common with physical services and manual processes.”
In the majority of cases where Kenyans have paid bribes to get services in public institutions, the survey notes, they were asked to pay for it in order to be served, while 22 percent of the people volunteered to pay the bribe.
