Parliament in session. We should look externally for solutions when no internal ones are forthcoming or viable. PHOTO | FILE
By CAROL MUSYOKA
In Summary
- Give others a chance to cure us from the graft malaise that bedevils us.
The National Assembly today voted unanimously for the
Bill to outsource the oversight and representative role of Parliament
to leading international audit firm CWP.
The same Bill also outsources the role of government
ministries to Dineshco, a business processing outsourcing company in
Madras, India.
The extraordinary Bill was the brainchild of the MP
for a previously unheard of constituency in Kwale county, long known to
have harboured desires for secession anyway.
“Since Pwani cannot leave Kenya, the next best
thing is for the government to leave us, and for us parliamentarians to
leave ourselves,” said the diminutive and often vituperative MP.
The quotation above sounds like a ridiculous
headline story in a freakish nightmare movie. But is it preposterous to
think of outsourcing as the solution to the chasmic corruption in the
executive and the cataclysmic rent seeking in the institution that is
supposed to keep the executive in check, namely Parliament?
Think about it for a River Road minute. We find a
company that is willing to run our government ministries and ensure that
efficient service delivery is procured for the ultimate customer: the
mwananchi. We pay the company a percentage of the national budget.
The company then delivers proficient services in
health, education, tourism, environment etc; procuring supplies from the
least cost provider and leveraging on economies of scale just from
ordering in bulk across the ministries.
We throw out the Cabinet Secretaries, Principal
Secretaries and the entire civil service. We will have a President who
will be the head of the country in as much as the non-executive chairman
of a private sector corporate is the ceremonial head of the
institution.
The President is actively encouraged to visit schools and hospitals and take appropriate kissing baby pictures for the media.
We then turn our attention to Parliament. We throw
them all out. We hire an audit firm to provide monitoring and oversight
over the company running the executive.
We keep 47 senators who will represent the counties
and meet the audit firm once a quarter to receive a report on what the
company running the executive is doing.
They only engage through the auditors. We encourage
the senators to visit schools and hospitals in their counties and take
appropriate kissing baby pictures for the media.
Kenya has now hard-wired corruption both in its institutions and in its collective DNA. We have to reboot.
But we have to outsource management of our
institutions away while we reboot. The idea of outsourcing everything,
while extreme, has been undertaken in smaller measures elsewhere.
The Financial Times, in its March 23,
2015, edition ran a story headlined: UK Government Outsourcing Raises
Questions Over Pay. It turns out that the coalition government in the UK
has outsourced 88 billion pounds (Sh12 trillion) worth of contracts to
the private sector.
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