Integrity of ISO certifiers put to test

By Jevans Nyabiage

The Standard’s popular column, Point Blank, published a letter on April 17 from one Mr Gachiengo Gitau, who expressed disappointment over the award of ISO certification to City Council of Nairobi.

Gachiengo said he would have wished to join the former Town Clerk Philip Kisia in celebrating City Hall’s new ISO status, but he just couldn’t. He isn’t convinced that the council deserves one.

“What do these ‘certifiers’ look for before bestowing the supposed prestigious standards certificates? Don’t they bother to look at the end product of the processes being inquired into or customer satisfaction?” he asks.

Gachiengo says he is not the only one not celebrating City Hall’s new achievement, most residents, he claims, aren’t amused. And for sure the award to City Council has elicited public uproar on whether it really deserved it.

Statutory bodies such as the Kenya Accreditation Services (KENAS) and the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) and lobby groups such as the Nairobi Central District Business Association, Motorists Association of Kenya and Consumers Federation of Kenya have all said the award is suspect.

The ISO 9000; 2008 certification by German firm DQS GmbH was awarded on the scope of service delivery to the public and local communities within Nairobi County after an audit verified that the council has implemented and maintains a Quality

Management System.

However, the council, in the public eye is synonymous with poor services with complaints ranging from heaps of garbage, poor street lighting, bad roads, land grabbing and runway corruption.
Critical issues

They say it beats logic that the council is ISO certified when critical issues such as health services, water provision, environmental conservation, garbage collection are deplorable.
Also there are claims of rampant corruption, crowd of shady dealings and scandals, particularly through selective payment of suppliers, which is a window of corruption.

The award raises serious questions about the relevance as well as the criteria used to award ISO certificates, currently as opposed to previous years.

These days, although inspection firms insist that ISO is a strong benchmark tool, it has lately ‘lost credibility’ as it seems anyone who applies for it gets it under a criterion that is not very clear.
The Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) managing director Eva Oduor says she was surprised how the council could be given a clean bill of health when it cannot offer basic services. “If the scope was service delivery, what can be certified within the council when even the markets under it are so filthy?” she asks.
Investigations
Although, Kisia insists that the council genuinely met all the set requirements, but State accreditation body, KENAS, says it is investigating the council and DQS Kenya, a company whose parent firm is headquartered in German, which gave the certification on whether the process was a sham.

“We are liaising with the certifier to put this issue into context, and know the scope on which the certification was granted,” said Sammy Milgo, the managing director of KENAS.
ISO certifications are issued by International Organisation for Standardisation. According to the organisation’s  website, the body  is the world’s largest developer and publisher of international standards.

The organisation is a network of the national standards institutes in 163 countries, one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. The ISO catalogue includes more than 19,000 published international standards classified according to the International Classification for Standards and by Technical Committee .
Milgo said the certification is a key performance indicator and it is expected that those accredited have a high level of quality of service and client satisfaction.
KENAS, which was recently constituted, is tasked with giving formal recognition that certification and inspection bodies, and laboratories are competent to carry out specific conformity assessment tasks.
In what could be one of the biggest corporate shams, Milgo also disclosed that the company, which issued the City Council of Nairobi with the ISO certification, is not accredited by KENAS.

“If there are a lot of complaints and it is established that the integrity has collapsed then there is an avenue to withdraw certification,” he said.

“The questions in this case have arisen from the market, which gives more merit for further audits and surveillance.”
Milgo noted that there was a fee for certification and this also could be an avenue of corruption.
KENAS could neither deny nor confirm allegations on a likelihood of bribery and corruption in awarding the ISO certifications, especially with an upsurge in the number of companies and institutions being ISO certified.

“If there are any such cases there are bodies charged with the responsibility to investigate such as the anti-corruption authority. I can’t say that money changed hands but I know that for City Council to be certified they must have paid a fee to get the certification service,” he said.
Audit firms and agents
For an institution to get the certification, customer satisfaction is top of the indicators.
Analysts say the certification puts the credibility of the auditing company or certifying agent in serious doubt.
When contacted, the German firm DQS GmbH, which carried out the audit said the issues raised by KENAS are under investigation by the top management of the company.

“We are aware of the media reports and the press briefing from KENAS. However the issues KENAS has raised are being discussed at our top management level,” Godfrey Maele of DQS Kenya told Financial Journal.
However, he said other issues about the services of the City Council of Nairobi, can be better handled by the relevant council officials. The council has been mired with ghost workers and poor service delivery.

In mid April, an audit report by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that 92 per cent of the Council’s workforce was incompetent and recommended that the council trim its bloated workforce.
In 2011, a similar report showed that the Council had 4,215 ghost workers on the payroll.
The ISO award leaves many questions in the eyes of the public, on what has lately become fashionable, considering many organisations are fighting to have the document which is also used as a marketing tool.
Even universities, some that were painted to harbour widespread nepotism and tribalism have turned to ISO.
Dubious inspection

Ministries, parastatals and other government agencies have also lately joined the fray, engaging inspection firms or agents only to find themselves being awarded these questionable standards.

Sunny Bindra, Nairobi-based management consultant and trainer says a look at the organisations that routinely receive these certifications one is left questioning their importance or relevance.
“An organisation’s performance does not come from certifications. It comes from actual delivery of services. The best stamp of approval is not from certificate providers; it is from customers, users and citizens,” Bindra says.

“I wish Kenyan organisations would work on simply providing reliable, affordable and efficient services.”
“ISO certification ought to improve the service and products of any certified firm. But it seems to me that ISO certification is used more like a fad,” Dr XN Iraki, University of Nairobi lecturer says.

However, he says ISO has not lost credibility, any firm that uses this certification in the right way is likely to gain in terms better brand recognition and bigger market share as a result of more satisfied customers.

“Those who hide their incompetence under ISO certification are eventually exposed by the market. It is firms that lose credibility, the same way schools lose credibility if their graduates do not perform in the market,” Iraki, who is the MBA programme co-coordinator at the University of Nairobi says.

The solution, he says, the market will eventually separate the wheat from the chaff.
“To bring back the spirit of ISO, there is need to demand tangible results particularly from customers. They need to come with tangible, visible and objectives measures of ISO certification success,” he adds.