Procurement of key election materials, which has over the years become the electoral agency’s Achilles heel, is rearing its head once again less than a year to the 2022 elections, after two key tenders were stopped in a span of one month.
The chairman of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), Mr Wafula Chebukati, has told the Sunday Nation that any further delay in procuring the key strategic election materials namely the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (Kiems) and the ballot paper printing tender, could see the commission resort to direct procurement.
The Public Procurement Administration and Review Board (PPARB) in September annulled the international tender for the supply, delivery and maintenance of the Kiems for the 2022 polls. Then this week, the board again stopped the award of ballot paper printing tender to Greek firm Inform-Lykos until a petition filed by a losing bidder, Africa Infrastructure Development Company, is heard and determined.
For IEBC, the Kiems and ballot paper printing are strategic election materials and delay in procuring them could negatively impact on other processes.
“As the chairman of the commission, I am very worried about this trend (of running to stop the procurement process) because what we are witnessing is purely business interests and nothing to do with irregular procurement,” said Mr Chebukati.
“If this state of affairs continues and leads to delay, it may force the commission to resort to using procurement methods that are likely to curtail competition and value for money. Further, this is likely to interfere with early preparations and readiness to conduct free, fair and credible election,” he added.
Direct procurement
In its life since it was established, procurement has often haunted IEBC leading to delays and direct procurement of materials. Worse, it has dented the commission’s image after some of the past service providers and suppliers of technology were linked to some people close to certain candidates.
“The elephant in the room is corruption which fuels the bidder wars. You are dealing with external vendors who, according to some reports, are linked to some politicians or senior people in government who instigate these bidder wars for their selfish interests. The fact that too many people are hoping to make a windfall from such processes means that you end up with the kind of shenanigans we keep seeing,” said Mr Mulle Musau, the national coordinator of Elections Observation Group (ELOG).
IEBC has in the past single-sourced most of key election materials. For instance, Smith & Ouzman, Al Ghurair and OT Morpho (Idemia) were all single sourced, often at the last minute, thus giving no room to carry out sufficient checks on the beneficiary firms.
Often, there is a pattern to it: IEBC advertises and invites bids, applications arrive and are evaluated but just before the award is done, someone runs to PPARB and the process is stopped. After sometime, the tender is annulled and the process has to start all over. At some point the process is stopped with a direct procurement the only option.
“One would not be entirely wrong in thinking that this is usually done deliberately and that has had a serious impact on the public confidence on IEBC. Direct procurement has always been treated with suspicion because it means people are not able to interrogate the process because it happens too late in the day. It, therefore, reinforces the thinking of a corrupt deal and, therefore, lack of fairness in the process and eventually in the elections,” said Mr Musau.
In the 2013 elections, the procurement of biometric voter registers and the Electronic Voter Identification System (EVID) was disrupted by tender wars that consumed IEBC staff and commissioners. At the end of the day, the government stepped in and negotiated an expensive government-to-government deal with Canada that saw Safran Morpho awarded direct tender to supply the BVR kits.
Ballot paper printing
In the run up to 2017 elections, again Safran Morpho which had rebranded to OT Morpho got the tender for Kiems kit and overall technology works again through direct procurement following vicious bidder rivalries.
Meanwhile in the tender for ballot paper printing, several fights at PPARB and the courts ended up with the commission controversially settling on Dubai’s Al Ghurair Printing and Publishing LLC for the Sh2.5 billion tender.
Audit reports following the 2017 elections also revealed a number of tenders that were directly awarded to firms. For instance, Africa Neurotech Systems Ltd was paid Sh165.8 million through direct procurement for expansion of the storage infrastructure for primary and secondary data centres by 50 terabytes. Even though the tender was for the 2017 elections, the company delivered in January 2018, five months after the elections.
In its report on procurements for the 2017 elections, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the National Assembly had apportioned blame on commissioners for failing to “offer urgent and decisive policy directions on procurement matters, compelling the secretariat to undertake direct procurement of all goods and services in a manner that was contrary to Article 227(1) of the constitution insofar as it did not embody a process that was fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.” BY DAILY NATION