County governments will have to adjust their budgets to accommodate the leased medical equipment project even as governors convene to discuss proposed extension of the programme by six months.
A crunch meeting by Heath CS Susan Nakhumicha, a select committee of Council of Governors and medical equipment programme (MES) vendors held on Thursday agreed to extend the contract period.
In the deal, the contracts will be extended by six months, from January 1 to June 30, 2024. The contracts expired last month.
The move is aimed at ensuring continuity of services as the counties prepare to transition from the leasing arrangement.
“We continue to make great strides in reaching a consensus on how to handle the Managed Equipment Services (MES) with intent to ensure continuity of services,” CoG Health committee chairman Muthomi Njuki said after the meeting.
The closed-door meeting was held at the Kenya School of Government.
This follows a resolution of the National and County Governments Coordinating Summit chaired by President William Ruto last month.
The summit resolved that a select technical committee comprising of MoH officials and CoG be formed to guide the counties in transiting from MES project that has been running for nine years.
CoG was represented in the meeting by its chairperson Anne Waiguru, vice chairperson Ahmed Abdullahi, Muthomi, whip Stephen Sang and legal affairs committee chairperson Mutula Kilonzo Jnr.
In the arrangement, the national government will pay the first three months of the contract – between January and March 2024.
The counties will pay between April 1 and June 30, 2024.
This implies that the devolved units, which have been relying on grants from the Ministry of Health to pay the programme, will now fund the project from their own budgets.
Thereafter, counties will be required to enter into contracts with individual vendors, on need basis.
“We agreed with vendors to reduce the prices by between 7.5 and 15 per cent,” a source told the Star.
Consequently, Waiguru has summoned an extra-ordinary full council meeting to discuss the proposal on Friday next week.
MES project was launched in May 2015, for a seven-year lease programme that ended in May 2022.
The Health ministry entered into a partnership with five foreign firms contracted to supply and instal specialised medical equipment.
They included General Electric from the US, Philips from the Netherlands, Bellco SGL from Italy, Esteem from India and Mindray Biomedical of China.
The firms leased special equipment for theatre, renal treatment, ICU and radiology.
However, the project has been marred by controversy with the state constantly revising the contract, pushing the total sum to Sh63 billion.
Governors have lamented that the project was pushed down their throats.
They said the Health ministry did not conduct needs assessment before authorising the deployment of the equipment.
They said the national government used uncouth means to force them to sign a memorandum of understanding that allowed the ministry to deploy the equipment.
“The chiefs were telling people that if cancer patients were dying it was because of my refusal to accept the equipment donated to them by the national government. I had to accept,” former Kakamega Governor Wycliffe Oparanya had said.
Several equipment are still said to be stuck in cartons in various health facilities due to lack of electricity, technical personnel to operate them or room where they can be installed.
A Senate report produced in 2020 indicated that the MES project was conceived like a criminal enterprise shrouded in opaque procurement processes, and aimed at selfish commercial interests.
“The committee has established that the entire procurement process in the MES project from conceptualisation to its implementation, is shrouded in secrecy and smells of irregularities and illegalities,” the report by Senate’s ad hoc committee read.
According to the committee, some of the equipment in the MES project was overpriced, substandard and delivered late or, in some cases, undelivered.