Why negotiation for State projects raises questions

Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich. [File, Standard]

It looks like when our government goes shopping for things like trains and dams, it is the worst negotiator. This is ‘Un-African’. I say this because as Africans, we are good at haggling. We bargain as much as we can in shops, as often as we can on the roadsides, and as hard as we can everywhere else. It is in our blood. 

The obvious reason why the government is behaving like a bad African is that when government people go to the market they are not using their own money to shop. So they either do not negotiate wholeheartedly, or they do the opposite thing - they negotiate upwards to ‘keep change’.