The Ministry of ICT on Tuesday awarded an exclusive contract to Convergence Media, which publishes the Star Newspaper, to print and distribute the MyGov pullout.
In an interview with Kenyans.co.ke for our flagship Evening Brief Newsletter available on LinkedIn, ICT PS Edward Kisiang'ani defended the decision noting that it was part of the government's policies to lower advertising expenditure.
He explained that initially, the plan was to share the revenue across the leading news publishers but Nation, Standard and People Daily bid with higher charges.
"If you read the law which governs the advertisement, it states that the government adverts can run in a newspaper of national circulation or the portal or other options. The creation of the newspaper with the highest circulation is the creation of the media itself," he explained in a phone interview.
"Secondly, the Government has been going through hell in terms of paying pending bills related to advertising. The original arrangement was to share the advertisement space in MyGov amongst the media houses and each media house had its own figure. Nation, Standard and People Daily have the highest. In fact, the Star seemed to have the lowest bid. In one week alone, we were losing a lot of money because all those media houses were giving their own rates."
Kisiang'ani exposed malpractices he argued were carried out by the leading media houses including extrapolating circulation numbers. Kenyans.co.ke's could not independently verify his allegations.
"Some media houses made more money than others on the same advertisements. In terms of our own survey, even though they were claiming that they could circulate up to 100,000 copies of the Nation and Standard, the truth of the matter was that they were probably only doing 5,000 copies," he added.
"We even followed those newspapers and found that even where they say they circulated MyGov Newspaper, you would find that in places like Homa Bay, they did not have the insertion but when they came to make the claim, they are talking about 100,000 copies."
He further argued that all media houses underwent a rigorous interview process before the state settled on Convergence Media, which is part of Radio Africa.
"What we did as Ministry is floated the tender with a view to reducing the cost of advertising. In fact, by around September, all the contracts had already expired but we renewed for all the media houses for three months and still advertised and called them for tender which they all did," he clarified.
"At the end of the interview, Nation and Standard stuck with a certain figure and they said they can't come down. The lowest bidder was The Star. So we gave it out to the lowest bidder. We went through the legal process. They were even called for negotiations to bring down their figures but they refused insisting they could only go up."
"If we were to share among the three, then we would have had a figure that is reasonable because they were in the same tender but each one was quoting different rates. When dealing with the Star, it is easier for us to monitor and to save government resources."
With the new contract, the Star will, therefore, exclusively distribute the pullout, a departure from the industry norm that accorded all four national newspapers the chance to share in the revenue.
Kisiang'ani further noted that the contract will be in place for two years after which other institutions will be invited to place their bids.
This exclusive first appeared in Thursday's edition of the Evening Brief Newsletter. To read more exclusives like this published every weekday, subscribe to the Evening Brief Newsletter here.
