Members of Parliament are now plotting to blacklist a French technology firm at the centre of multibillion shilling tenders for poll materials to the electoral commission in the 2017 General Election. National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was incensed on Monday after directors of OT-Morpho now renamed Idemia snubbed summons to shed light on issues raised by Auditor-General’s report on the 2017 elections.
The Firm supplied poll materials to IEBC for the 2013 and 2017 General Elections. In 2017, it received a Sh4.5 billion tender to supply 45,000 electronic kits used in the August 8 election. A further Sh2.5 billion tender was given to firm for materials used in the repeat presidential poll on October 26, 2017.
Curiously, during the time, it has changed names three times from Safran Morpho in 2013 to OT Morpho in the 2017 elections and now Idemia. But even as the MPs breathed fire, the company has already won a multibillion deal to supply bio-metric kits for fresh national identity card registration exercise that is expected to cost the taxpayer Sh6 billion ahead of the national census exercise in August this year.
Kenya plans to start mass biometric registration of fingerprints on March 18 with Interior Principal Secretary Karanja Kibicho saying the French firm has already supplied 31,500 biometric kits for the exercise set to last 45 days.
It is estimated that half the budget will be spent directly on the kits with bulk of the remaining funds set for the 50,000 registration officers contracted for the exercise. The MPs agreed to give the firm one more chance to appear before the committee on February 18, or risk grave consequences.