•Regional commissioner says non-performers will be blacklisted
•Departmental heads to attend regular meetings and give progress report
The government will not pay contractors who do shoddy work, North Eastern regional commissioner Mohamed Birik has said.
Birik at the same time said bad contractors risk being blacklisted.
He said the old days are long gone when contractors colluded with rogue government officials to falsify progress reports of projects to be paid and vanish.
The administrator was chairing a Regional Development Implementation Coordination Committee meeting in Garissa yesterday.
“This committee will be very strict at every step of project implementation. We shall recommend that a contractor should not to be paid if we are not satisfied with his work,” Birik said.
“We have incidents where a contractor has been paid over 50 per cent for a job while on the ground he has delivered about 30 per cent. This will not be entertained anymore.”
The government will ensure there is value for every coin spent on its projects, the administrator said.
In the past, some contractors took advantage of insecurity and the vastness of the region to carry out shoddy work because government officials rarely visited to evaluate the projects.
Birik said with the formation of the RDICC there will be a paradigm shift in the way government projects are initiated, tendered, implemented and delivered.
“Timelines must be adhered to because this has been a loophole where project costs are varied to allow corruption to thrive,” he said.
The regional commissioner said all heads of departments undertaking projects must attend bi-weekly meetings and give a progress report. “All heads of departments when invited for the meeting must attend in person. There will be no delegation.”
Birik regretted that some projects conceived way back in 2015 have not been completed.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, at a meeting with regional and county commissioners in Mombasa late last year, said government officials would be held personally responsible if projects were not implemented and delivered as per specifications.
The President said he would not entertain excuses, noting that government officials are the "eyes of the government" on the ground mandated to ensure that all public projects and programmes succeed.
One of the major projects being undertaken by the national government in North Eastern is the Sh12 billion solar plant in Raya, Garissa county, set to add 54MW to the national grid. The project is due for commissioning by the President.
Others are the tarmacking of the 165km Nuno-Modogashe road which, according the Kenya National Highway Authority, is 90 per cent complete and the building of several dams and water pans through the Northern Water Service Board.
Birik said with the massive investment in projects and programmes in the region, the government should be felt on the ground.
The commissioner said nobody should use insecurity as the excuse for non-delivery of services.
The government has improved security around Boni forest to ward off al Shabaab attacks in Holugho, Fafi and Ijara sub-counties.