James Ayugi opens up on World Bank debarment of Webmasters
Kenyan tech firm Webmasters Africa, the company behind the government’s e-Citizen platform, has been debarred by the World Bank over irregularities uncovered during a company-registry project it built for Somalia.
The firm’s CEO, James Ayugi, acknowledges that project resources were changed without following the Bank’s required approval process.
The relationship between Webmasters and the World Bank stretches back years. The company says its first contract was a World Bank project, a history that made it a natural fit to develop Somalia’s federal company registry, a multi-year, donor-funded initiative rolled out across several federal member states.
But it was on that same project that the Bank identified the irregularities that ultimately led to Webmasters’ debarment.
“We are more focused on delivering the project — which we did — and we failed on complying with certain requirements, and that’s where we’ve been working through, just making sure that moving forward we are always compliant,” Ayugi said.
Ayugi says staff were swapped with people who had what he described as “equivalent expertise” as the project extended over several years through repeated no-cost extensions. However, he concedes that the company did not follow the Bank’s required process for approving those substitutions.
“As I’ve publicly stated in the past, we agree, because we appealed and our appeal was not accepted, and for that reason we say we proceed and move forward, so it has not affected us in any way.”
Some industry players have gone further, describing the debarment as a finding of fraud. Ayugi rejects that characterisation.
“I also understand there are players in the industry that wanted to paint the picture — fraud. They’re not in the ground. I was in the ground. So, whatever they say, it doesn’t matter. We were there, we delivered the project, and we’re happy with what we delivered,” he said.
On personal cost, Ayugi is dismissive. But on the relationship itself, he’s emphatic, this is a partnership that pre-dates the Somalia contract by more than a decade, and one he insists survives the fallout.
“By the way, we were born by the World Bank. Our first project was a World Bank project. So we’ve learned everything that we know when it comes to investment climate, and the kind of systems governments need to put in place to empower their citizens,” he said.
Even so, Webmasters says it now intends to move away from World Bank-tendered contracts altogether, betting instead on partnership … and on a pivot toward building its own ventures, including a new social-commerce app, WasaaChat, currently in pilot.
“We will partner with World Bank, not tender. I believe they’ll come to us. They’ll understand our impact in less than five years, and we will partner with them, because they are still very, very important in our society,” Ayugi said.
For now, the debarment stands and Webmasters is, for now, locked out of any World Bank-financed tender.
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