Data transparency as a tool of fighting public sector corruption and embedding social accountability

The last few months have birthed an unprecedented awakening of the Kenyan public consciousness around the issues of corruption, and the failures of the state in entrenching transparency and accountability within the existing Public Finance Management frameworks. As the dust settles on the countrywide protests, it is important to reflect on what ‘transparency and accountability’, terms that are now part of the popular parlance mean in practice, and the systemic challenges that prevent us from fully realizing them.

The OECD iLibrary Glossary defines transparency as: An environment in which the objectives of policy, its legal, institutional, and economic framework, policy decisions and their rationale, data and information related to monetary and financial policies, and the terms of agencies’ accountability, are provided to the public in a comprehensible, accessible, and timely manner.

A lot of research on transparency favor this definition, as it is unassuming and contextual. But many also take it for granted, instead supplanting it for its literal dictionary meaning. Public discourse on transparency therefore often neglects the three important ingredients that undergird it:  comprehensibility, accessibility and timeliness.

When those three ingredients are either partially present or absent, it is as research has noted that the quality of transparency achieved does not necessarily lead to accountability. “We need to start holding our leaders accountable” and “We need to vote wisely” are now familiar calls to action, an allusion to our collective power against errant and erring public officers. This collective power, as many Kenyans have recently shown and seen, can be channeled towards challenging political leadership, and demanding for accountability. In anti-corruption work and research, this is referred to as social accountability.

Social accountability, as a theory and practice, has in recent years served as a battleground for effective anti-corruption work (a subject for a future essay). But these efforts remain difficult for many reasons, including due to the inertia and resignation produced when public information is unstructured and incomprehensive or incomprehensible.

When we remind ourselves of our constitutional power through nudging each other to vote, therefore, is it a battle cry or a death rattle, an attempt at maintaining dignity despite insurmountable odds? Labored metaphors aside, it is worth asking what information the regular Kenyan has, that might empower them to truly hold their leaders accountable.

In this piece we will examine the extent to which Kenya’s efforts to drive transparency have met the threshold of comprehensibility, accessibility, and timeliness, the achievements we have made and some of the persisting challenges. Given the breadth of this topic, we will focus on subcomponents from three key domains: service delivery, public procurement and prosecution and recovery statistics.

Transparency in service delivery

In 2017, the then President Uhuru Kenyatta launched the Delivery Portal. According to the website, the purpose of the Government Delivery Services, and by extension the portal, was to improve the coordination of National government flagship programs, monitor, evaluate and report on the timely fulfillment of key development priorities, programmes and projects. As with many projects in Kenya, big and small, the portal was launched with much fanfare, and according to the media reports at the time, the Government committed to respond to questions raised through the portal within 48 hours. As I write this, the portal is a ghost town, with less than 5 projects scantily reported on.

Fast forward six years later, in 2023, the Government of Kenya under the new administration launched Project Beta, a reporting and monitoring tool to report and evaluate the implementation of projects by the National Government, Presidential Directives and Crime Statistics across the country.  As far as I can tell, the tool is not available to the public.

Availability of information on the government’s budget/promises against delivery remains a critical gap. Given this dearth of information, the private sector/civil society and lately even private individuals have in some cases deployed their own resources to independently track the promises made by the government. These initiatives are laudable, of course, but they are taxing and insufficient. Except for government projects that affect citizens at a micro level (e.g., a parent with a school going child will know if the school is under-resourced, at least to a reasonable extent), there does not seem to be a way to track what the government or a public officer, a Governor for instance, is delivering at an overall level. This presents many accountability problems. It is one thing to know what the health budget is for the year, but if you don’t know what has been budgeted for the hospital you visit, and who the budget custodian is, the responsibility is attributed to an “amorphous” government function, without any one official that people can put to task.

Transparency in government procurement

The Kenya Public Procurement Regulatory Authority estimates that Public Procurement in Kenya accounts for 10% to 13% of the GDP i.e., well over KES 1 Trillion in 2024. With this kind of spend, it is not surprising that Public Procurement in Kenya remains a most prime ground for corruption. This is not for a lack of regulation or institutionalization; public procurement regulations are some of the most prescriptive and comprehensive laws. But what is the level of transparency in public procurement system in Kenya?

The Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act (PPADA) is the primary law governing procurement and asset disposal of public assets in Kenya. The Act establishes the aforementioned Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) to enforce it. PPADA accords PPRA with a broad mandate including to ensure that the public procurement and disposal system espouses the values of the constitution, receiving and acting on complaints relating to public procurement and disposal amongst others. Tacked in this long list of functions, the Act provides PPRA with a key transparency role. It mandates the PPRA to create a repository or database that includes complaints received, entities debarred or prohibited from providing services to the government, benchmarked market prices for goods, non-compliant state organs, statistics related to public procurement amongst others. It also stipulates that the Authority is to provide “any information related to procurement that may be necessary for the public.”

PPRA has executed this responsibility in several ways. On its website, it publishes a list of firms that have been debarred from providing services to the government, as well as a price benchmark for non-specialized standard items, known as common user items. This is critical information in undertaking due diligence of potential suppliers/partners, assessing corruption risks amongst other uses.

It is notable, however, that procurement statistics have remained elusive to the public.

In 2018, President Uhuru Kenyatta, issued an executive order requiring government agencies to publish the full details of all tenders and awards, starting 01 July 2018. This was envisaged to enhance the level of public scrutiny upon the government by the public. The initiative subsequently spawned a centralized Public Procurement Information Portal, a database for tenders delivered by the Ministry of ICT.

Granted, the website contains a lot of information regarding contracts issued by state procurement entities. The information is organized by tenders per procuring entity, contracts by year, and suppliers by year. This is certainly useful information, particularly when working backwards to validate a specific issue or suspicion. Perusing through the site, however, one is struck by the sheer volume of data available, which is presented without any analysis or dashboards. Its mass adoption for social accountability is therefore doubtful at best, if not impossible. For instance, there is no way to utilize this information to analyse procurement spend against budget, spend against category of items, prices per unit against the benchmark provided by PPRA, tie tenders to contracts or any number of things that a social accountability framework would demand.  

Whereas the data is largely available, therefore, you will rarely see it quoted, even by the media. This is because by requiring such a herculean amount of effort to make sense of it, it fails at being comprehensible, and therefore does not meet the minimum threshold for transparency.

As already alluded to, and in line with the provisions of the Act, PPRA from time to time publishes market prices for what are known as ��common user items”. Ostensibly, the purpose of the market price index is to ensure that the public can identify price inflation (for instance if a county armchair costs KES 1M or a parastatal buys a pen at KES 8K). This information therefore cannot be used in isolation, it’s complementary to budget and spend data, which is not easily available for use. As such, whereas I know that PPRA prescribes an average price of KES 24 in Nairobi County, I have no way of easily finding out what the County is purchasing pens for.  

This is complicated by the fact that the Market Price Index is not up to date, the third ingredient of timeliness. This matters, because in the absence of up-to-date information, and given the volatile macroeconomic conditions, procuring entities may need to procure items that are legitimately priced above the latest index. How and who makes sure that this loophole is not exploited to perpetrate corruption?

Transparency in prosecution and recovery statistics

This is another important aspect of the fight against corruption. Successful prosecutions and recovery of public assets are crucial aspects of enforcing accountability.

The Law Enforcement and Prosecuting Authorities, particularly the EACC and the ODPP, through their social media sites, make laudable efforts to notify the public on anti-corruption matters coming up in the courts during the coming week, and any key outcomes. The EACC also occasionally shares information on recovered public assets and consolidates the statistics in their annual reports and strategies.

There are, however, a number of challenges with this mode of presentation. Firstly, public access to this information entirely depends on the proactiveness and whims of the Communications Departments in individual institutions. In other words, you get what you get. Secondly, and similar to the procurement statistics, there is no way to analyse this information and understand where we are at a national level. How many grand corruption cases are dragging their way through the courts, for how long? What is the trend of decisions made on anti-corruption cases over time, and are they sufficiently punitive? What are some of the legal technicalities affecting corruption cases? In the gigabytes of information law enforcement authorities have shared over the years, all this information is theoretically publicly available. But is it truly comprehensible?

I would argue that it is because there is no centralized database that tells the story of Kenya’s successes or prosecution failures, that the public turns to the media  when there is need to galvanize social accountability.

Beyond social action, this information is a critical input in research on anti-corruption and therefore in devising the right policy and program interventions.

There are models we can look onto for inspiration. In Nigeria, for instance, a Corruption Cases website has an easy-to-use self-navigation dashboard.  There are also other systems that track corruption in specific domains.  

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is not the work of the regular citizen to constantly confront their government. There is enough to the drudgery of making a living to afford the time. However, in the event that institutions where we have delegated this authority do not do their work, we need to have in place systems and databases that are comprehensive, updated in a timely manner and do not require one to be a data or tech wizard to comprehend the information.

*all links were last accessed on 08 September 2024.