The Deputy Chief of Staff in the Executive Office of the President, Eliud Owalo, has announced the publishing of a draft bill to be tabled in parliament that will lay down laws affecting how government Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) are funded.
Speaking while conducting a performance review for the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) Owalo stated that the Performance Management Bill was drafted following concerns over some underperforming government agencies and the negative impact this has on the nation's development.
According to Owalo, this new legal framework will ensure that underperforming MDAs die a natural death while those that go over and beyond their mandate will be rewarded with more funding and support.
"Organizations must justify their existence in line with their mandate. To augment this process, we are going to anchor performance evaluation and performance management into law," Owalo stated.
"We already have a draft Bill, The Performance Management Bill, which will soon be getting its way into Parliament for the necessary processes towards becoming the Performance Management Act. This will ensure that the results of performance appraisal are legally enforceable."
The bill, which will soon be tabled in parliament, will pave the way for monitoring the efficiency of public institutions, with performance reviews becoming an essential part of the accountability process.
It will also introduce Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between government agencies that operate simultaneously within shared spaces or rely on each other to meet national objectives.
This framework is expected to allow for accountability and help reduce inefficiencies caused by a lack of coordination between different agencies working together.
“Moving forward, we will ensure that we have service level agreements between Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) and other sister organizations which are also involved in the operations of the port so that each organization meets its obligations within the stipulated timelines," Owalo stated.
"We will ensure that where we have a multiplicity of players in terms of government agencies, these government agencies will have to enter into service level agreements. This will facilitate efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery so that each entity is committed to meeting timelines."
Owalo was responding to concerns by KPA Managing Director Captain William Ruto's concerns that agencies that work hand-in-hand with KPA sometimes delay their operations but since performance evaluations focus on end results, it affected their performance.
According to the Captain, the government needed to come up with a framework to ensure that multi-agency operations ran seamlessly.
“We have other agencies that are supposed to support us, but they can sometimes derail our operations. We recommend that moving forward, the evaluation criteria should be adjusted to capture issues that are outside our control," Captain Ruto lamented.
"For instance, while the truck turnaround time is supposed to be three hours, delays can occur when trucks arrive and other agencies need to handle the goods, and there are issues such as non-functioning scanners. Our evaluations focus on the actual results, rather than these external factors. Therefore, we would like to see future evaluations consider the commitment of these institutions and the external factors that also affect our performance.”
