JamboPay gets contract extension again for another 30 days

Clamped car in Nairobi's CBD.

City Hall has again extended the contract of JamboPay Company for another one month to aid in revenue collection across the county.

This comes as a relief to city residents who were afraid that they would have been forced to revert to the manual payment system for essential services including parking, single business permits, licences among others should an extension not been granted.

Jambo Pay –whose mother company is Web Tribe Ltd- is responsible for the automation of all the 138 revenue streams in Nairobi and collection of revenue on behalf of City Hall albeit at a fee.

Webtribe Chief Executive Officer, Danson Muchemi confirmed to The Standard that his firms’ contract had been extended for another 30 days even as City Hall puts measures in place to establish its own Integrated Revenue Management system.

“The contract was extended yesterday for a limited amount of time following consultations involving both parties. The terms of engagement however remain the same,” stated Muchemi.

According to the tech boss, the extension was only meant to help City Hall as they (City Hall) transfer their data from the Jambo Pay servers to their data centre.

Nairobi County ICT and E-Government chief officer Halkhano Waqo had said that the extension was to allow for Jambo Pay to midwife the transition process before City Hall takes over the system permanently.

“Everybody knows we are transiting, a process that is not going to happen overnight. We have everything at our disposal but of course we are engaging JamboPay to continue nursing the process for some time,” said Waqo.

Jambo Pay Company has been collecting revenue on behalf of City Hall since 2014 but its contract expired on April 7, 2019. City Hall however extended the contract of the company by another thirty days to ensure for smooth transition of the systems. The extension expired on Tuesday but it has since extended by another month.

The decision to extend Jambo Pay contract was arrived at after revelations that none of the firms that applied to replace JamboPay met the technical evaluation criteria after a tendering process. City Hall had advertised for the contract in February.

Governor Mike Sonko, while appearing before the Senate’s County Public Accounts and Investments Committee in April, said his administration would stop outsourcing after the expiry of JamboPay's contract.

Mr. Sonko said the county would acquire its own software for collecting payments including land rates and parking fees.

This comes against a revelation that City Hall has set aside Sh205 million that will be used to set up a new revenue management system.

In the new arrangement, however, Governor Mike Sonko's administration plans to acquire its own integrated revenue system, a move it says will improve collections.

This was revealed by the County Fiscal Strategy Paper and the Debt Management Strategy Paper for the 2019/20 financial year.

Out of the Sh205 million budget, Sh191 million will go towards maintenance of e-payments and Sh14 million used to install a Business Intelligent (BI) system, according to the report.

BI refers to technologies, applications and practices for collection, integration, analysis and presentation of business information to support better business decision making.