When red tape bogs down service delivery

How much does a business licence cost? Sorry. It's a secret. FILE PHOTO | NMG 

By JENNY LUESBY

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Summary

• If our state bodies want to spend funds on posters declaring they’re a ‘corruption-free zone’, spend first publishing their prices.

Using my formidable powers of investigative journalism, I have discovered a state secret!

Well, actually, I just opened some websites. And, unfortunately, it’s the secret I’ve discovered, not the answer: because Kenya has perfected a whole domain of state secrecy that no other country I have ever lived in thought was secret.

How much do government services cost? The challenge: ‘find the price’. I failed.

You would think, as we enjoy (endure) entreaty after entreaty to abandon corruption, that one particularly helpful aid would be publicising those prices as part of our e-government drive, in a move that would close down many an entry-level leakage.

For, if those prices were public, we consumers might be very difficult to persuade to pay some other price. But apparently not.

Of course, maybe, I just don’t have what it takes to track down these prices, and really, they are there.

But what triggered my search, this time, was a meeting with two Kenyan farmers launching a seeds business. We were discussing their Kephis (Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service) seed certification. The first bad news was that it was going to take a year.

Then, I asked them the cost. They told me they had visited their local Kephis office and been given prices, but, said the farmer: “I want to go to the Nairobi HQ and see how much they say it is”.

Doubletake. I won’t comment on the cost to our economy of thousands of farmers making multiple different regional office visits to achieve their own on-the-ground reference pricing. But, surely, the price is the price – swing to Kephis website. The Kephis website is far better than it used to be, and spells out the seed certification process – but no prices, guys.

I searched long and hard, through regulations on authorising seed certification bodies, that gave the fees for that as addendum four of a 35-page document. I found a Sh75,000 fee mentioned in paragraph 15 of a seed merchant registration form.

But seed certification fees – nowhere. An hour later, I admitted defeat.

Is it always like that? I set off to the US, to look at how they do seed certification. It took me a few minutes to find the “Minnesota Crop Improvement Association – Fee Schedule – Seed Certification – Field Crops”, but I found it, and many others. American farmers are allowed to know how much seed certification costs – ours aren’t. Ours have to get the prices from individual civil servants, verbally.

Now, I apologise for this ungenerous thought, but do those officers ever ‘forget’ the precise price, with it not being written down anywhere. Might there ever, indeed, be a civil servant who verbally gives a price larger than the (unpublicised) official one?

Either way, I guess Kephis gets to keep its fees secret for another day.

But how is everyone else faring? I went to Kebs (Kenya Bureau of Standards) to find its fees for product certification. No. Defeated.
Nairobi City County– how much does a business licence cost? No. Secret.

….Or buried so obscurely it defeated me.

Yet that one strikes a particular chord. For, in the early years of my now long-standing Nairobi-based business, we didn’t do well on our business licence. We got visited by a purported City Hall employee, and paid three times the fee we subsequently tracked down as the right one.

The next year, we went to City Hall five times to get the form and be told the amount due: it was nearly a war to explain that we totally did not need ‘help’, just the form and how much the cheque should be payable for.

But it was a war that paid off, in more than a decade, since, of swift and easy business permits, all no more than form plus cheque (bankers): we wised up.

So woe betide the rest of you as you visit, visit, and visit, in the quest to find out the price.

It’s a state secret. Because that helps with Kenyan business planning, and closing down corruption? Be serious. If our state bodies want to spend funds on posters declaring they’re a ‘corruption-free zone’, spend first publishing their prices. Which actually would help.