Nairobi News

Hustle

Sonko extends JamboPay contract as search for new revenue firm continues

May 9th, 2019 2 min read

Nairobi County government has yet again extended JamboPay’s contract as it struggles to set up its own revenue collection system.

The latest extension is the second in only a month since the contract between the two parties officially elapsed in April 7, 2019.

The first extension was done last month, for a period of a month, but this elapsed at midnight on Tuesday, May 7 necessitating the current extension.

Nairobi County ICT and E-government chief officer Mr Halkano Waqo said  the new additional time will allow the county to complete the migration of the digital system to City Hall to enable them start running their own system.

He explained that the county has been in the process of migrating most of the systems to its own data centre and servers located at City Hall and it was difficult to abruptly dispense with JamboPay before the process was fully completed.

‘TRANSITION PROCESS’

“It is not an extension per se as people are putting it but they are just supporting us in the transition process and so we saw it better to prolong the period so that they can continue supporting us for few weeks.

“Maybe in the next two weeks maximum, we will be able to shake off hands and tell them thank you so much you have supported us and now we can be on our own,” added the ICT chief officer.

Mr Waqo said that the county had already migrated most data, servers, critical information and some applications to power up their own system.

On his part, JamboPay chief executive officer Danson Muchemi confirmed that indeed their contract with City Hall has been extended for another month on terms similar to the previous one month extension.

“Yes we received an extension on Tuesday following consultation with the county government for a limited period of time,” said Mr Muchemi.

City Hall has been grappling with acquiring its own Integrated County Revenue Management system even going ahead to set aside Sh205 million for the process.