Well it seems like the new Vice President House or is it now the Prime Ministers House is not complete. It was meant to have been completed in 2005...well its 2008 and it's nowhere nearing completion. various reasons for the delay are given which I will expound on. There are two main issues-:
1. Working for the government is not easy. While tendering, the government is required by law to publish the tender details in a local daily, which is a good thing or you will never get to know about these things. The bad side is that what happens in such situations is, everyone who has a jembe and a wheelbarrow considers himself a contractor and applies for the tender. This person normally wont have the capacity to do the job at the required skill level and will probably be the lowest in terms of cost. These are the guys who get the jobs mostly and later on when there are delays you realise that the guy shouldn't have been given the job in the first place.
Another problem is the inspectors from the ministry. They look at your contract value, come along to site inspect and check that you are complying in every way possible to their specifications and find that you are doing a better job than expected. This is when they claim that you are earning too much money and you can part with Ksh. 1m or more without it hurting your pocket...the guy then proceeds to hold you ransom by not signing the necessary certification papers!
Also the government is a very slow moving behemoth of a bureaucracy. It takes ages to get paid and if you are not a big company with enough capital and deeeeep pockets, you are done for. If you can forget those government contracts.
2. The contractors, due to the above mentioned "problems" resort to political patronage to get jobs. You will find a contractor getting a job and actually getting paid the full amount (they have connections to a person with weight to throw around) and they still end up not doing the job. Why should they? They pay their patron some cut from the total amount and he protects them from any minion trying to get to them. All they will do, if its a road, is patch it up till the next payment that they get and basta!
For example whoever has been to western Kenya will note the poor state of the roads. All these years, all the western Kenya road repair contracts have been going to a major firm based in Kisumu (no names). They do get paid every year for the "work done" (actually to be done) What they do is very evident in the state of the roads! This is a company that could recently afford to go all the way from Kisumu to Mombasa to do a 10km stretch of road beating out all the Mombasa contractors! As far as I can tell they do have political patronage so no one does anything to them and they still get on getting all the road repair contracts.
Political patronage can be dangerous some times since our politicians do like overstepping their mandate and increasing their job description to cover areas that do not concern them.
Contracting in Kenya is a challenging business.
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