Officers’ morning activity driven by selfish interests

In a bid to enhance performance and service delivery in the public sector, the government introduced performance contracts some years ago.

For the uninitiated, performance contracts for the mandarins in state corporations is a freely negotiated performance agreement between a government, acting as the owner of a public agency and the management of the agency.

It is used in Kenya’s public agencies to measure performance.

Government agencies, after years of utter mismanagement, had to toe some line somehow and this is how the not-so-sweet tablet of performance contracting was prescribed by the Western “doctors” to cure our ostensibly corrupt and lazy ways of doing business.

IMPROVED SERVICE

So, if there is one thing that drives a chill down many a government types, it is performance contracts.

Today, government ministries and state corporations face tremendous pressure to improve service delivery, lower costs and become more accountable.

If you have been to the immigration department, armed with all manner of documents and ready to sweat it out before you got your passport, only to be pleasantly surprised at how fast the service these days has turned out to be, that is performance contracting at its best.

But it is unclear whether the introduction of performance contract has improved service delivery for customers in some instances. This, I will explain in a moment.

The National Police Service, in whose docket the Traffic Department falls is also under PC. So our good friends at the traffic department are also under the microscope of PC.

For them to pass the PC test, they must prosecute. This is the reason why, early in the morning, traffic police officers will shock many a motorist by turning down a healthy bribe.

We had grown accustomed to the fact that many of them will smile at the sight of a currency note.

Nowadays, if you are arrested early in the morning, chances are high you are one of the statistics to feed up the PC file.

This is why traffic police officers on the roads during morning hours appear like they all woke up on the wrong sides of their beds.

The truth of the matter is, they are usually on the wrong side of the prosecution numbers and until those numbers are achieved, they will have none of your business.

RACK IN THE NUMBERS

In any case you are already wasting their time which they should be using responsibly to rack in the numbers so that they can have ample time to hustle for themselves once they have achieved the target for that day.

It is for this reason that, in the morning, you will be arrested for the most mundane of infractions.

But after mid-morning, we are back to negotiated settlement.

So how is driving up numbers for the sake of performance contracts a service delivery innovation in the traffic department?