A few months ago, I needed to get something done on the Government of Kenya’s E-Citizen portal. A few clicks here, some double clicks there, and an M-Pesa payment or two later, and the deed was done—all at, please pardon the cliché, the click of a button. I was reminded of the tortuous route that government agencies had to navigate to get here.

Many years ago, I sat on the board of one of the pioneer government agencies to get on board E-Citizen. Every single ball was thrown at us as to why we could never go electronic, and we were not ready to confront the contorted face of resistance so brazenly. We were called by the Government Digital Payments team to a meeting to explain why our organization was stalling.

Some mid-level managers from the operations team, as well as the irascible head of IT, sat across the table from the Principal Secretary of the Ministry, some of the board directors, and the Digital Payments team. Upon being challenged as to why they were stalling, one manager proceeded to sneer and shouted—yes, actually shouted—at the Digital Payments team, saying that online processing could never work. We were taken aback, as there was absolutely no fear or trepidation in her voice. Manual processing—and its attendant inefficiencies—was here to stay whether we liked it or not. The head of IT, who it was apparent couldn’t differentiate an emaciated French fry from a microchip, at least had the temerity to look worried, most likely because his incompetence was split wide open for all to see. He meekly agreed with the shouting manager, all the while his eyes darting around faster than a cornered rat looking for an escape.

We didn’t need a genius to tell us what was going on. We were looking directly at the faces of the historically famous Giriama freedom fighter Mekatilili wa Menza and her resistance warriors. We finished the meeting with some irreducible minimums drawn in the sand. A few weeks later, the pilot project for online processing hit a snag, and customers could not make payments to complete their service requests. The CEO went to the operations team, determined not to leave the shop floor until the root cause had been identified.

A step-by-step analysis of the servers revealed that the simplest tool of resistance had been effected. The main server through which payments were being processed was not powered on. Upon deeper investigation, including lifting the power cable and hand-holding it to the power source, the team discovered that someone had removed the power plug from the electric socket. After all, no weapon formed against the resistance was going to prosper! Why the server room was not a securely locked and restricted area in the first place was the million-dollar question asked of the artificially intelligent IT lead.

Today, E-Citizen boasts over 16,000 services from more than one hundred government ministries, counties, departments, and agencies. For each service, there are untold stories of the blood, sweat, and tears of the teams who worked crazy hours to get the operating system stable enough to process transactions in real time. Others sat for hours to understand the granularity behind government processes and translate that into the software code that enables online processing of that service and its subsequent payment.

For our entity, we moved from annual cash collections of KES 300 million to about KES 1.2 billion within three years of switching to E-Citizen. This quadrupling of collections was not without many more of the Mekatilili battles because, as we learned, a bureaucratic inefficiency is often directly correlated to a personal financial inefficiency for someone along the value chain. In October 2024, the National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi revealed that by the end of the financial year in June 2023, the government had collected KES 26.4 billion from E-Citizen. However, this number almost quadrupled to KES 127 billion by June 2024 once the government moved to a single payment number and added thousands more services.

The financial benefits are eye-watering. But what’s seldom told are the painful battles that were internally fought to get the government to that level of efficiency over the last decade. I doff my hat to the indefatigable digital players who fought the resistance!

X:@carolmusyoka

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