Partnerships in public, private enterprises have turned into a disaster

Serious people, trying to handle specific problems, often come up with good ideas which sometimes work well in one country but face challenges in another, partly because of socio-political operating environments. One such idea is the Public Private Partnership (PPP), meant to speed the delivery of public goods beyond available state capabilities.

Ordinarily, the State should provide basic public goods including infrastructure, access to utilities and educational and health services. Since states do not always have the capacity, they outsource those services to willing providers.

The PPP delivered in some advanced countries and ran into hardships in others where State officials had not internalised the concept. The tendency for officials in concept importing countries to embrace concepts wholesale because the master states have said it is good tends to boomerang.

Implementing runs into challenges in the process of internalising and adjusting the imported concept to suit different socio-economic-cultural and political environment. Kenya’s attempted adoption of the PPP flops as it tries to force an externally borrowed idea without proper preparation.

PPP floundered at the altar of bureaucracy. It received a lot of publicity as Parliament established the mechanism for its operations in 2013 and revised it in 2015. The structure of the mechanism, however, makes the team running PPP just another layer of bureaucracy, not a facilitator of service delivery.

Having delivered

It requires the potential investor to trigger the partnership process, which then goes through the rigmarole of frustrations before approval can be obtained.

As a result, the potential or interested public institution that should in theory benefit from the PPP then has the difficult task of trying to mobilize political contacts in order to get the matter moving.

The mechanisms for PPP operations have turned out to be public disasters that simply give the potential investors a runaround. Having delivered virtually zilch in five years, there now is talk of revising the PPP Act. Yet, within the Government structure, there are supervisory and monitoring units whose purpose is to ensure that other units do not indulge in project sabotage.

The President’s Delivery Unit, PDU, is probably the best known with many functionaries. It somehow seems to hit administrative snags because of inefficiency. The PPP office has many applications for approval but it seems to be overwhelmed.There are several public institutions that are adversely affected by the inoperability of the PPP.

Education sector

Among them are numerous cash-starving universities that hoped to persuade investors to build hostels for incoming students. The operating thinking was for the universities to get out of the business of housing and feeding students in order to concentrate on the core business of teaching and research.

At present, the universities are not doing well, whether in housing and feeding or imparting and generating knowledge. The failure of the PPP mechanism to deliver in the education sector might explain the declining ability of the universities to deliver on material as well as intellectual things. They instead tend to be conveyor belts of papers called degrees.

The health docket also suffers from the same malady of good intentions accompanied by poor delivery. Although there have been credible attempts, the image that keeps coming up is one of constant three way responsibility blame shifting involving the national government, the county governments, and the health unions.

This boils down to the fact that hospitals lack medicine and essential equipment, motivated personnel, and overall delivery policies. The institutions that are affiliated to health, such as NHIF, attract negative attention of loss of finances and inability to deliver. The demotivating environment makes it difficult to attract serious willing investors in governmental health care projects through the PPP.

While importing the PPP idea was well intended, the importers failed to take into account the Kenyan reality.

Instead of spreading positivity in investments for public good, it emits negative vibrations that can drive investors away. It probably succeeded in creating jobs, but not in delivering on institutions and infrastructure. It does not facilitate, it frustrates. It needs serious rethinking in terms of its philosophy and operations.

Prof Munene teaches History and International Relations at USIU