MUTERE: Why procurement is a hot potato for public servants

In Kenya, a ‘Sh1 Billion’ headline triggers public outrage, especially when it is associated with missing, misuse, or misappropriation of public funds.

This because our history as a country is littered with a litany of graft cases that evoke images of excess, greed and impunity.

The public outrage is understandable because these scandals make our lives harder. The true price is always felt when hospitals run out of essential medicines and children are forced to learn under trees and in the National Government Affirmative Action Fund’s case, as we shall shortly see, school going girls lack sanitary pads.

But numbers alone, especially in public finance, rarely tell the whole story. This is best illustrated by the recent headlines surrounding NGAAF. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has recently cast a spotlight on the agency’s CEO, who is under investigation over allegations of possessing unexplained wealth amounting to about Sh1 billion.

I will not go very deep into this case because it would be sub-judice, but now is a good time to have a conversation on what happens when doing the right thing becomes politically inconvenient.

To the public imagination, Sh1 billion evokes images of private wealth, hidden accounts and lavish lifestyles. For context, the money is equivalent to NGAAF-run Kenya’s Free Sanitary Towels programme, one of the country’s most socially important yet administratively complex interventions.

This is an important issue because sanitary towels are about dignity and play a pivotal role in increasing school attendance for millions of girls.

Sanitary pads procurement has been a thorny issue for NGAAF, which has attempted to follow procurement rules that have seen the agency advertise for tenders, cancel them when challenged and re-advertise in compliance with procurement laws.

Unfortunately, as in the past, this adherence to procurement rules often results in delays, and when this does not happen, there is always backlash and political pressure to fast-track or bend procurement laws and processes.

This is also a political hot potato because it sits at the intersection of public procurement law, national versus county interests, gender advocacy and fiscal classification rules set by the National Treasury.

On this, the law is clear on one technical but crucial question: recurrent budgets cannot be treated like development budgets, because they follow different rules and demand different controls. In other words, you cannot use funds for, say, salaries to buy computers even when there is pressure to comply.

But as alluded to earlier, in the absence of context, we often get distracted by issues of alleged personal enrichment at the expense of what truly matters.

However, stripped of this context, public debate is easily diverted toward allegations of personal enrichment rather than a sober assessment of how public programmes are lawfully implemented.

Before outrage translates to judgment, it is worth asking if we interrogating personal enrichment, or are we collapsing a national programme budget into a headline-friendly figure?

If ensuring sanitary towels reach girls lawfully creates headwinds, then the problem is not integrity. The problem is a system that makes doing right harder than doing wrong.

Kenya’s accountability institutions exist precisely to ensure cases are driven by facts, evidence and not noise. As such meaningful scrutiny must extend beyond individuals to institutions including the Women Representatives’ Caucus chaired by Jane Kagiri, the Ministry of Gender under CS Hannah Wendot and PS Anne Wang’ombe.

Equal scrutiny must also extend to the NGAAF Board, the Head of Public Service and the National Treasury. When we abandon that distinction, we risk discouraging the very integrity we claim to demand from public servants.

Finally, the bigger question is whether we want public servants who bend the law to avoid controversy or those willing to endure scrutiny to uphold it?

Also, do we want government programmes that ignore process or lawful programmes that protect both dignity and public trust?

Because today, the spotlight is on NGAAF CEO, tomorrow, it could be on any young Kenyan trying to serve honestly.

Mutere is a human rights and social development specialist passionate about governance and women's rights