Procurement Legislation and Procurement Performance: a Case of Kenya National Highways Authority

Abstract

The public Procurement processes is a complex issue due to the multiple interests and objectives it strives to achieve simultaneously and coupled by the multiple regulatory policies and bodies it has to adhere to. The major objectives of public procurement legislation include achieving efficiency and effectiveness, and ensuring fair competition amongst suppliers. The objective was to establish the role of procurement legislation on procurement performance at Kenya National Highways Authority. The research adopted a descriptive research design where data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to 25 senior and middle level managers at the organization. The findings showed that procurement laws had reduce political interference in the tendering process as well as increased level of confidentiality in the tendering process. The laws also was found to have encouraged the segregation of duties among employees of procurement department; maintaining all documentation relating to the tendering process and maintaining continuous improvement with suppliers which combined has improved the transparency level in the organization. Generally, the procurement legislation had improved the organizations tendering process and level of customer satisfaction. The research had some limitation in the sense that although the indicator of procurement performance was multidimensional, a true effect of public legislation on performance should be assessed by examining multiple measures of performance representing different stakeholders.