Top corporates battle for lucrative eCitizen deals
National Treasury CS Prof Njuguna Ndung’u before a House team on February 13.
The Interior Ministry has opened the race for the management and administration of the expanded eCitizen portal, setting the stage for a titanic corporate battle over one of Kenya’s most critical service delivery platforms.
eCitizen is an online portal through which the government provides essential services such as applications for passports, driving licences, business registration certificates, vehicle logbooks and title deeds.
“We have opened the job to the best service providers because more government services have been automated and eCitizen now plays a bigger and more sensitive role in government operations,” a top government official told Nation.
The multibillion-shilling eCitizen deals are expected to attract some of the country’s biggest technology and financial service providers, with the winning bidders expected to facilitate government delivery of at least 5,700 services through the portal.
The tenders were floated last week through the Immigration Services docket, a department of the Interior ministry.
One of the contracts will see the winning bidder manage the portal and oversee the flow of billions from service seekers’ pockets into the government’s consolidated account at KCB Bank.
The contractor will also be tasked with sending reports to Immigration Services on funds collection and outages. “The vendor will guarantee services availability of 99.982 per cent for a given year. For maintenance, the vendor will provide the client with seven business days’ advance written notice. In the event of any unscheduled downtime, the client and vendor will determine the cause of the downtime. If downtime is in excess of the established SLA (service level agreement), the vendor shall meet the penalties specified for the SLA,” the Interior ministry partly stated in its tender call.
Software maintenance, backup, and recovery of data will also fall squarely on the contractor’s lap.
The second deal is for maintenance, and the winning bidder will be required to ensure the portal runs smoothly while fixing any bugs that affect its access and performance.
Companies are free to place bids either independently or as a consortium. But if participating as a group, each consortium will have to seek the Competition Authority of Kenya’s greenlight.
The tender documents indicate that both local and foreign firms can throw their hats in the ring. But foreign firms will be required to source at least 40 per cent of any equipment needed from local suppliers.
State-owned firms are also eligible, but only if they can prove that they are legally and financially autonomous, and are not under the supervision of Immigration Services. Firms have, however, been barred from bidding for both contracts.
The tenders have been floated four months after the National Treasury published a gazette notice stating that the government had taken over control of eCitizen from Webmasters Kenya Ltd – the private company that developed the portal in 2014.
Treasury CS Njuguna Ndung’u in December 2022 revoked payment platforms that had been in use since 2014 and introduced new channels for money remittance through bank and mobile money wallets.
Its ownership has been the subject of a complex case in the High Court, which revealed a series of monumental blunders by the government that has exposed taxpayers to a multimillion-shilling payout to private companies.
The portal started as a pilot programme financed by the World Bank, which then allowed Kenya permission to use, alter and even replicate it.
Webmasters had been hired by the World Bank to develop the software. But the government, without any procurement or any similar framework, maintained Webmasters’ services and asked the private firm to make several upgrades to eCitizen, including the addition of services from the initial 10 to hundreds of others.
Goldrock Capital Ltd sued the Treasury and Webmasters in 2017 after being locked out of eCitizen fund collection platforms, and sought Sh127 million it claimed was owed for services rendered.
The Treasury in its defence said Goldrock Capital was not authorised to collect funds, hence had no grounds to claim the Sh127 million.
Webmasters and the government were initially on the same side, arguing that Goldrock has no claim. But they became foes when ownership of eCitizen became a focal point of the case.
The Treasury claimed ownership on account of the World Bank's permission to use, alter or replicate eCitizen. Webmasters insisted that the improvements and additional services it has put into eCitizen make it a different product from what the World Bank handed over to Kenya.
Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah had also filed a suit challenging the lack of procurement and costs charged to service seekers. His suit was consolidated with Goldrock’s case.
But following the out-of-court talks between the government and the private firms, Mr Omtatah was allowed to revive his independent case and amend the suit.
