William Ruto said you can access 31 government services on your phone. He's mostly right

Newly operationalised Lamu Huduma centre in Lamu Town on Friday 14th October, 2016. PHOTO | KALUME KAZUNGU | NATION MEDIA GROUP

Can you access 31 government services on your mobile phone?

 “…They’ve also told us that they want to digitize government. Hussein (TV host), today on your phone you can access 31 government services…”

 

Deputy Ruto during an Interview on Sunday Live, on July 2, 2017

In an interview on Citizen TV Deputy President William Ruto accused the National Super Alliance of pledging to digitise government, yet the Jubilee government had already done that.

The Nasa Coalition in its manifesto pledges to “modernise all registries and administrative services, streamline processes, cut bureaucracy and instill a customer service culture.”

In its manifesto implementation document it also pledges to “avail a unified integrated digital system that captures every citizen’s information from birth and transits the data for national identification, passport issuance and voter registration.”

In March 11, 2015, President Kenyatta launched the Integrated Population Registration System, which was for the purpose of consolidating births, deaths, marriages, divorce, passport and identification information for the purpose of enhancing efficiency in accessing information, and also for this information to be used by various state agencies.

According to the Public Sector ICT Survey Report 2016 by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, about 43 percent of government institutions are offering e-government services, with the national government offering 48 per cent and the devolved county governments offering 42 per cent.

An online tour by Nation Newsplex to the official Government’s portal for online services eCitizen, launched in 2014, shows that there are currently 21 government services being offered online, which relate to civil registration, land, immigration, driving licenses, marriage and business.

Two services related to land are still in the development process (one for acquiring Land Rent Clearance Certificate from the Ministry of Lands, and obtaining official copy).

Newsplex contacted the ICT Authority to seeking the official statistics regarding the usage of eCitizen and other online government services. The ICT Authority had not responded to by the time of going to press.

Other government sites visited were the Kenya Revenue Authority’s iTax, the National Transport Safety Authority (NTSA) online portal (four services), Access to Government Procurement Opportunities (AGPO) online portal, Electronic Foreign National Services (eFNS), eBusiness, eVisa and the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) website.

This totals up the number of government online services identified by Newsplex to 30.

Media reports as of February 2016 indicate that eCitizen had by then registered 1.23 million Kenyans. In as much as the government has done a lot in digitising its services, it has done little in information-sharing of key data, thus making it impossible for it to be held accountable to some of the services it renders to the public.