Use electronic procurement to reduce wage bill, says Ndemo

By MARGARET KANINI

NAIROBI, KENYA: The Government has been asked to computerise the country’s procurement processes to help reduce the wage bill.

The former Information and Communication Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo said automation of all official procurement process would reduce corruption and wastage which are linked to high wage bill.

 “The Government should for instance use the Internet to advertise and send e-mails and calls to public officials for interviews and jobs rather than massively advertising in newspapers that consumes much of its cash” he said. Dr Ndemo who is also the honorary chair of the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was speaking at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa Tuesday during an IT forum.

 The forum was to identify how Africa can take early advantage of the shifts in computing to become a global front-runner using new technologies.

“Reducing the salaries of top officials by 20 and 10 per cent will not cut down the runaway public sector wage bill,” said Ndemo.

The conference was hosted by the International Business machines (IBM), a research and technology firm in partnership with the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT).

Participants debated on how new technologies such as cognitive computing could address help several socio-economic challenges faced by Kenyans and Africa at large.

The meeting was told that Kenya can use cognitive computing systems which interact naturally with people and help human experts make better decisions to solve issues in healthcare, education, governance, agribusiness, infrastructure among others.

Dr Kamal Bhattacharya, the director of IBM research -Africa noted that about 80 per cent of adults in the sub-Saharan region lack access to financial services which eventually holds back individuals and small businesses.