Have you ever wondered of how someone rose from being a receptionist at NHIF to a millionaire? Then you haven’t seen what happened at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). Did you know that IEBC went flat out to award contracts to certain firms, against all legal and regulatory challenges, to the loss of the taxpayer?
Details have emerged that IEBC also bought some items at three times the market rate even as it paid for materials that were delivered long after the 2017 election had ended.
A South African company interested in the contract had its offer in dead water. Ren-Form CC, proposed to print and deliver presidential ballot papers in less than a fortnight, if contracted.
The presidential papers for the General Election arrived on August 1, 2017. Implicitly, IEBC wasn’t time-strapped as it claimed to justify the contract award to Al Ghurair.
Notably, Al Ghurair printed an extra 1.2 million (instead of the 196,115 agreed at the Plenary) presidential ballots in controversial circumstances, a matter that further complicated the already strained relations between Chebukati and Chiloba.
Apart from the controversy-strewn contracts for KIEMS and ballot papers, almost all other financial deals had a tint of fraud. The acquisition of data bundles can only pass for a spending binge.
IEBC acquired Sh127.6 million worth of data bundles (149,640GB or 149TB) from Safaricom, Telkom and Airtel. Yet when the Auditor General analysed Internet use on the SIM cards, only 605.3GB of bundles worth Sh515,269 had been used — a mere 0.4 per cent of the acquisition.
It’s incomprehensible that IEBC didn’t enter into a postpaid arrangement with the telcos. Either elements in the secretariat were out to make a fast kill or an extravagant IEBC failed to pre-quantify the amount of data required before issuing the contract. Consequently, Sh127.08 million went to waste or was misappropriated.
The IBM infrastructure contract awarded on July 17, 2017 and scheduled to run through to June 2018, was given out for Sh425 million yet the evaluation committee had recommended that it be procured at Sh75 million.
The contract involved supply and delivery of vulnerability and event management services, cyber security operations centre, web application and next general firewalls, anti-distributed denial of service solution, e-mail security and licences, network discovery and compliance solution, and one-year hardware warranty and technical support.
Fourth, the Commission’s ICT department had requisitioned purchase of Oracle database solutions and licences at Sh80 million but it was awarded for Sh273 million.
Yet, despite the inflated cost, Oracle partially delivered — it conducted one training instead of six. Database Vault, Real Application Cluster (that enables sharing of resources in form of cloud architecture) and training were “not complete”, according to audits.
IEBC contracted Africa Neurotech Systems Ltd to supply, install, implement, and commission and support its primary and secondary data centre equipment. It was paid Sh249.3 million against contract budget of Sh130 million. But according to the Auditor General, the Commission “paid the vendor before testing and commissioning the equipment”. The data centre wasn’t ready at the time of August Election.
Despite non-compliance, IEBC still engaged Neurotech — through direct procurement — to supply and deliver storage expansion for the converged infrastructure, at a cost of Sh165.7 million.
Sh165.7 million was paid against a user requisition of Sh124 million. The equipment was delivered on January 9, 2018 — well after the FPE. In the end, IEBC paid Neurotech Sh415 million for facilities never used during the two elections.
As regards Telkom, it wasn’t among those pre-qualified for the tender (co-location services for data centre and disaster recovery site). However, in unclear terms, IEBC’s evaluation committee recommended it be awarded the contract, which was inexplicably overvalued by Sh4.92 million.
Intriguingly, the cost for cloud services during FPE was Sh50.7 million more than during the General Elections.
On June 20, 2017, the then IT chief Chris Msando presented a paper on the transmission of results for the August elections in which he indicated that some polling stations were out of the 3G and 4G network coverage required for KEMS transmission of results. An analysis found 11,115 stations reportedly outside the network coverage.
To cover this, IEBC proposed 1,000 and 1500 satellite units (at cost of Sh550 million and Sh825 million respectively) to be used in results from outside the requisite network. The first batch of Airtel’s 1,000 Thuraya data modems and SIM cards were distributed to constituencies before the August 8 elections.
However, in the end, only 339 modems and SIM cards with 4GB were used. The rest, according to IEBC internal audit, were delivered on August 24, 2017, way after the polls — although the Auditor General says that they were in fact supplied much later on October 5, 2017.
That apart, a ballot box that cost Sh1,800 during the August election was later procured at Sh2,500 for the FPE. This was in spite of the similarity in specifications and same supplier. Thus IEBC lost Sh27.9 million (from purchase of 42,927 boxes) in inflated costing.
Instead, the commission rushed to contract Ramaas Supplies Ltd, through direct procurement, for 500,000 seals at Sh24.5 million (at Sh49 a unit) to mitigate the shortfall. Instructively, this company had failed at the preliminary evaluation stage during the tender process, having quoted Sh18.10 a unit.