To the corrupt politicians and police, add ICT professionals

What you need to know:

  • It cannot be that only the Police Service and politicians are corrupt in this country; they must be assisted by the professional engineer, land surveyor, doctor, accountant, lawyer, among others, who make such illegal transactions possible.
  • Who is the technical contact who advises on the decisions to select suppliers, confirm delivery and initiate payments? It is the ICT professional.
  • Offers come in all forms and may include expensive, fully-paid round trip site visits abroad, apparently to appreciate how the “live” system works.

Now that the President has drawn first blood in the fight against corruption, we must find ways to support his gesture in order to make it sustainable.

As they say, corruption does fight back and unless this fight against corruption is taken up locally by all professions, it is likely to fizzle out and default back to “business as usual”

According to Transparency International, Kenya is ranked no 145 out of 175 economies in terms of corruption levels. Put differently, only 30 other countries in the world are more corrupt than Kenya.

According to the report, our immediate neighbours Tanzania, Uganda and even our remote brothers in Nigeria are doing better than we are in terms of dealing with corruption, and since ICT professionals are included among Kenyans, it is highly likely that they have also made some contributions towards achieving this embarrassing position.

In other words, it cannot be that only the Police Service and politicians are corrupt in this country; they must be assisted by the professional engineer, land surveyor, doctor, accountant, lawyer, amongst others, who make such illegal transactions possible.

And so today, we shall expose some of the ways ICT professionals contribute towards making Kenya notorious for corruption in the spirit of supporting the clean-up strategy commenced by the President.

TENDERS

ICT projects are some of the most lucrative in the market. Indeed, 80 per cent of the Anglo-Leasing projects were technically ICT projects, though publicly known as “security” projects. ICT projects are comparatively harder to understand, evaluate and monitor and so they naturally become the best platform to siphon public money through.

Who is the technical contact who advises on the decisions to select suppliers, confirm delivery and initiate payments? It is the ICT professional. 

The bad news is that it is fairly easy for a compromised ICT professional to influence supplier selections at the tender stage because the procuring entity relies entirely on their expertise at this point. 

In fact, in some cases, the ICT project may not be necessary, in the sense that it is not aligned to the organisation’s strategic objectives. However, the ICT professional can simply invent a need for a multimillion-dollar project in order to create the avenues for kick-backs that always emerge in such projects.

On the other hand, even if the ICT project is strategically justified, you can still find pressure to compromise the ICT professional coming from within and beyond the organisation. Political leaders or board members who may have preferred suppliers could begin to put pressure on the CEO, and by extension the ICT professional, to ensure a pre-determined supplier wins the tender – of course at a “small cost”.

Suppliers, through their own initiative, may also outdo each other in terms of throwing offers at the ICT professional in order to win the tender. Offers come in all forms and may include expensive, fully paid site visits abroad, apparently to appreciate how the “live” system works.

Other offers may be more direct, coming in the form of the famous “brown envelope”, with a promise for a bigger one once the tender is awarded.

MAINTENANCE FEES

Another avenue for corruption revolves around maintenance and licensing fees. ICT services are, by nature, continuously evolving. This is because the business environment is ever changing, requiring modifications to existing software. Additionally, previously unknown software bugs will always emerge once the system begins to be extensively used across the organisation.

To cater for these dynamics, most suppliers would offer a maintenance contract, which is often pegged on a percentage of the total cost of the system, payable annually. So annual licensing fees or software maintenance fees are acceptable and inevitable in the ICT industry.

However, a compromised ICT professional can choose to sign off and have fictitious claims of maintenance services paid, even in instances where this service has not been rendered.

Another example would be a payment for bandwidth upgrades to a supplier who does not effect the upgrade, with the understanding that the net benefit would be shared with the ICT professional.

Your traditional financial auditor will have no technical capacity to cross-check such facts. Perhaps it is time we made information systems audits as mandatory as the annual financial audits in order to address such situations.

ICT SERVICES

One other gravy train runs around ICT goods and services. These are by nature non-tangible and therefore quite difficult to inspect, evaluate and apportion value to. So you get instances where a website developed for one Ministry is priced ten times higher than another developed for another Ministry. Or you find cases of Internet provision for one county purporting to be “free” while it is commercially provided at exorbitant rates in another county.

Additionally, it has now become fashionable to buy iPads, laptops or high-end phones for top officials in national and county governments, Parliament, county assemblies or boards. You can find huge variations in the price of these gadgets, depending on how the suppliers “collaborated” with the ICT professionals.

One common corrupt move is for the ICT professional to define a high-end specification for the device and get high quotations for it, while delivering a device with lesser specifications and therefore a lower price value. The supplier gets paid off for the higher-value device and, of course, the difference in value is shared elsewhere.

In conclusion, one can say that it is quite premature to celebrate the end of corruption simply because a few big boys and girls have been forced to step aside. Irrespective of the fact that some of them are guaranteed a big, choreographed comeback, the real war against corruption must begin with you and me.  

The big question is, are you willing to expose corruption practices in your profession in order to begin the process of addressing them?

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu Email: [email protected]