What awaits the new ICT Cabinet Secretary
When the President announced Dr Fred Matiang'i as the Cabinet Secretary nominee Information, Communication and Technology, the ICT fraternity got busy on Google.
The question was, who is this guy?
Prior to the nomination, names of leading candidates for the post had been doing rounds in the grapevine and included, Dr Bitange Ndemo, current Permanent Secretary in the Information and Communication ministry, Davis Chirchir, the URP Secretary General and formerly the IT Director of the defunct Kenya Posts & Telecommunications (KP&TC), Dr Shem Ochuodho, a PhD holder in Computer Science and unsuccessful Deputy Presidential Candidate, Dr Julius Kipng'etich, a PhD holder in Management Science, formerly MD for Kenya Wildlife Service and currently at Equity Bank.
All the above have extensive, hands on “ICT” experience and the ICT fraternity would not have been surprised in any of them got the nomination for ICT Secretary.
But the President had his own name and sprung the surprise Dr. Fred Matiang'i, a PhD holder in Communication & Comparative Literature, who was formerly working at the Center for International Development, State University of New York. (READ: Profile: Dr Fred Okengo Matiangi)
Basically Dr. Matiang'i is a Governance and Development expert and the ICT fraternity was left wondering if he will be up to the task – especially because the Jubilee government has “digital” as its brand and a central theme of its agenda.
The history of ICT within the Kenya Government started in the 1960s when Treasury decided to buy a mainframe computer to automate the Payroll services of government employees.
For many decades, Treasury therefore became the center of competence as far as ICT is concerned, under a department known as Government Information Technology Services (GITS).
This began to change in 1998 when a new Communication Act was introduced that split KP&TC into three arms of Telkom Kenya, Postal Corporation of Kenya and the Regulator, CCK. This Act also introduced the National Communication Secretariat (NCS) that mandated the Ministry of Information & Communication to oversee the ICT Policy framework for the Country.
In 2002, the Narc Government introduced a new body, the eGovernment Secretariat to oversee the computerization effort beyond Treasury and mainstream it into the rest of the Government Ministries.
Finally, the most recent agency to get into the ICT government landscape was the Kenya ICT Board (KICTB), introduced in 2005 to market Kenya as an ICT destination.
All these “ICT” government bodies many a times have been working under different authorities due to their historical, administrative and legislative constitution. A case in point relates to GITS, eGovernment and the Kenya ICT Board which all report to different authorities but in practice have overlaps in terms of budgetary allocations as well as what they are trying to achieve.
You will find that in practice, GITS, perhaps by proximity to Treasury gets the largest ICT budget from Government while eGovernment Secretariat which is supposed to oversee the overall ICT initiatives across the government ministries simply gets “operational” or recurrent budgetary allocations. GITs therefore gets the money but has limited focus within Treasury, while eGovernment with the wider focus and mandate to extend government services gets limited budgetary allocation.
Meanwhile, Kenya ICT Board (KICTB), by virtue of its capacity to network internationally, tends to get huge funding from development partners for various government related ICT Projects. KICTB therefore has gladly filled in the gap created by the budgetary tension between GITS and eGovernment Secretariat. Today, if you talk about digitizing government operations, you think “ICT Board”, whereas strictly speaking we should be thinking “eGovernment Secretariat”.
But these budgetary and functional tensions are not limited between GITS, eGovernment and ICT Board. There has been a less evident, but emerging tension between the Regulator, CCK and the National Communication Secretariat (NCS), a department within the Ministry of ICT mandated to develop ICT Policy.
In principle, the Ministry is supposed to develop ICT Policy while the Regulator is expected to implement it. At a local or national level, this has worked well but tensions have cropped up at the international level where the Regulatory position and the Ministerial positions have tended to clash - as witnessed in the recent ITU 2012 and ICANN 2013 meetings in Dubai and Beijing respectively.
It is on this background that one can begin to see that the new Cabinet Secretary for ICT is walking into a maze that he must quickly appreciate and then begin to streamline so as to deliver on the Jubilee government's mandate of being the “digital” government.
Specifically, he must re-organise the ICT framework within government by eliminating the overlaps between the various ICT agencies. This overlaps exist at the Policy, Legislative and Implementation levels. More emphasis should be on budgetary allocations between these ICT Agencies because as the saying goes – whoever pays the piper calls the tune – irrespective of what the policy or the legislation may say.
The writer is a lecturer at Multimedia University.
