Can technology eliminate corruption?

The government has in recent times put more pressure in the implementation and use of the Integrated Financial Management Information (IFMIS) platform within ministries.

IFMIS is a computerised financial system aimed at capturing and reporting government expenditure in near real-time.

It is assumed that by automating the financial processes across all government departments and agencies, it would be easier to reign in on the rampant corruption and pilferages frequently occasioned by government officials when dealing with tax payers money.

But is IFMIS the magical solution to our Kenyan problem of embezzling and misappropriating public funds?

First, we must acknowledge that automation does improve transparency and accountability.

Without automation, the Auditor General used to be 4-5 years behind the fact or event. In other words, audited government reports used to be discussed in Parliament 4-5 years after the theft had taken place and the culprits had long moved on.

With automation, it is possible for the Auditor General to file audited accounts within 1-2 years of the event and therefore putting preventive pressure on the culprits who now know that their actions would be discussed fairly soon and within the institutional memory of their colleagues.

But automation without top leadership commitment to fight corruption will not yield the desired outcome. Indeed, corrupt deals in government can never be successfully executed unless authorised or blessed from “above”.

In other words, if the Principal Secretary or the chief executive officer of a parastatal wishes to rip-off the public, they will still find ways and means to do so and cover their tracks. Unfortunately, there is no amount of automation that can prevent this.

One quick way to do this is by incurring the expenditure outside the IFMIS tool – that is use the manual and verbal ways of authorising expenditure.

Another method - with the help of compromised IT professionals - is to use the IFMIS tool but disable or outrightly delete the corresponding audit-trail.

But if the IT team fails to cooperate, the determined high ranking government official still has the option of compromising the Auditor General staff so that they conveniently forget to highlight significant queries.

Beyond that, he or she can always think ahead and spare part of the fraudulent funds with view to “talking” to the Prosecution or eventually the Judge; to have the case disappear or dropped altogether for lack of adequate evidence.

In summary, dealing with corruption requires the same approach as dealing with a mutating AIDS epidemic. It requires a multi-pronged approach that involves multiple players with different interventions in order to be successful. Isolated IT automation of processes is not sufficient and can never be the single sliver bullet to end corruption.

Rwanda's civil service is for example considered less corrupt than Kenya's - despite the fact that their automation levels are much lower than Kenya's.

Perhaps it is because their executive, judiciary, prosecution and professionals practice zero-tolerance to corruption while we on the other hand seem to celebrate corruption and its perpetrators.