Even with incompetent staff, City Council bags ISO

By JOE KIARIE

If you were to visit the City Council of Nairobi (CCN) website Friday you would expect to be greeted by news that the council is now International Standard Organisation (ISO) - certified.

But last Tuesday’s ‘milestone’ was just not news enough. Not that the CCN is too keen on updating its website anyway. The last article posted on the news section of its website is dated August 17, last year. The piece describes reforms at City Hall, among them, the adoption of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in revenue collection and administrative approvals.

Nairobi councillors engaged in a scuffle at City Hall. [PHOTOS: FILE/STANDARD]

Mr Muriuki terms it an extraordinary contradiction for the award to be hinged on aspects such as ICT, finance, planning, asset valuation and human resource just two weeks after an audit showed that almost the entire City Hall staff is inept.

"This beats logic since the driver of all these so-called internationally certified processes is the staff?" Muriuki avers.

Shady deals

He emphasises that the council was wrong to seek ISO certification on issues like ICT while overlooking critical issues such as health services, water provision, environmental conservation, garbage collection, fighting corruption and disaster management.

"What service delivery can you talk of in a council that cannot fight a fire? Despite having modern fire-fighting equipment, we recently saw the staff frantically reading the manuals on site as valuable property was reduced to ashes.

City Hall should seek certification on issues that affect residents daily. It is engulfed in many shady dealings and scandals, particularly through selective payment of suppliers, which is a window of corruption. They do not deserve the certificate," Muriuki asserts.

Motorists Association of Kenya Chairman Peter Murima strongly contests the ISO certification if ICT was used as one of the benchmarks. He terms it unfortunate that motorists continue to suffer as the council clings onto manual collection of parking fees as opposed to the automated system.

"We still live in an era where parking attendants take cover and re-emerge with clumps or breakdown vehicles once a motorist has parked for some minutes. PSVs are also affected as they have to pay manually to attendants at the bus termini.

Motorists are getting a raw deal despite paying millions of shillings every week. We expect the city council to reciprocate by moving on with time," he notes.

Mr Murima says reintroduction of parking metres strategically placed across the city would curb corruption and also ease the pain of motorists, who would have to pay based on parking duration as opposed to fixed full-day charges.

Muriuki echoes the statement, noting that parking fee, which comprises one of the main sources of revenue for the council, could be doubled if the collection process is automated.

In February, the High Court quashed the decision by the council to increase parking fees in the Central Business District, with Justice Weldon Korir saying the council should introduce parking meters to assist calculate the charges.

Consumers Federation of Kenya secretary general Stephen Mutoro states that while City Hall’s ISO certification award raises serious questions about the relevance as well as the criteria used to award ISO certificates currently as opposed to previous years.

Political gesture

"The question is not whether City Hall merits the award but rather what ISO is all about. As consumer representatives, we highly doubt the ISO since it seems anyone who applies for it gets it under a criteria that is not very clear. The certificate is no longer relevant," he says.

Mr Mutoro notes that ISO and other certification bodies are largely irrelevant as they are rarely in line with consumers.

"While an audit could give the council a clean bill of health, just ask City Hall consumers about the quality of service delivery and the answer is anyone’s guess," the secretary general asserts.

Barrack Muluka, a commentator on social and political issues, says the certification puts the credibility of the auditing company in serious doubt.

But he says it is the timing that draws more suspicion. Apparently, the awarding ceremony, which was engulfed in political undertones, was Mr Kisia’s last official engagement as Town Clerk before quitting to join elective politics. Kisia is to vie for the Nairobi governor’s seat in the next elections and unveiled his secretariat on Wednesday.

Mr Muluka opines that the event was not a coincidence but rather a well-choreographed move. "The ISO award was merely a political gesture," he states.