Delivery portal; politics of transparency and accountability

Portal; politics of transparency and accountability

Nambale–Ganjala–Nakhasiko–Nangina, the earth road I divert onto from the Kisumu-Busia highway whenever I drive home, is ‘under procurement’, declares the President’s Delivery Unit, using a well-publicised online portal. But what does ‘under procurement’ mean?

I posed the question to friends on a social media account. How long does something ‘under procurement’ in Government take to be delivered? In exchanges on the social media, it became clear that opinion on the portal was sharply divided.

On the one hand, its detractors saw it as the latest mechanism for public relations by the Jubilee government, keen to bombard the public with glossy information in the lead-up to the general election later this year. On the other hand, its promoters saw it as another smart apparatus devised by the Jubilee Government to enhance transparency and accountability to the public.

So who is right? What intention is behind the portal? Is it public relations, as the detractors argue? Or it is transparency and accountability, as its promoters suggest?

Establishing the truth would need some bit of understanding what the three concepts; public relations, transparency and accountability stand for. Evidence from using the portal itself can then be used to determine where it fits within the descriptive categories that the three concepts provide.

To begin with, Public Relations in this context would imply the deliberate cultivation and maintenance of a favourable public image of the Jubilee government. This can even be at the expense of facts and truth, where data can be manipulated so long as it gives the Jubilee Government a positive public image.

If the portal’s intention is public relations, then information about it would be confined to the positives of the Jubilee government alone and it would be about mobilisation of a positive public image to ride through a critical moment such as the upcoming general elections.

Transparency on the other hand is mainly focused on providing details of what has transpired. It involves giving answers and explanations of how decisions were reached and implemented and thus constitutes what in the literature on accountability is referred to as the ‘answerability’ dimension of accountability.

If the portal is meant to serve the purpose of transparency, it would provide elaborate information, including explanation of how decisions were reached and how funds were handled.

Finally, accountability entails both answerability (transparency) and consequences for the answers provided. Accountability would demand that not only are answers clearly given, but also failures and mistakes are punished. If the portal’s intention is accountability, it would provide details of failure and what has happened to those causing the failure.

FEEDBACK SECTION

To test further the usability of the portal, I quickly registered on the portal using the feedback section that it provided and posed two questions. To the first question, which was simply to find out if the whole feedback arrangement worked, there was a very swift response, with someone coming back to me almost immediately with an answer, wondering if I had asked a question and received no response.

To the second question however, asking what ‘under procurement’ meant and how long we had to wait before works on the road above could commence, I am as yet to receive a response, having asked it on the morning of April 19, 2017 .

What this meant was that perhaps there are a number of non-technical people behind the portal to respond to simple questions, giving it the impression of responsiveness, but not actually providing technical answers.

If this is the case, then the portal would clearly be the latest elaborate online apparatus for Jubilee Government’s positive self-imaging, with an eye on the coming elections.

To shift the portal towards transparency and accountability, it would demand more than what is currently operational on the portal. To be fair, the portal serves to some extent some aspects of transparency.

For instance, it provides perhaps the first ever government details on the road quoted above. Before the portal, I had never heard any official information on that road. But to move towards full transparency, further answers to questions like what I posed should be provided as and when demanded by users of the portal.

In terms of accountability, the portal has no indication of failures and consequences for failure. Overall, the portal is strongest as a tool for Public Relations, weakest on accountability and stands in the middle on transparency.

On a positive note however, it is a good beginning in disclosing what government has been up to. But to make it more useful beyond the coming elections, it needs to embrace features that enhance transparency and accountability.

Mr Muyumbu is a Governance and Accountability Advisor for a UK NGO