Factors Influencing Completion of Construction of Court Projects in Judiciary:A Case of Magistrate Courts in Western, Nyanza and Rift Valley Regions of Kenya

Abstract

The Judiciary is one of the three State organs established under Chapter 10, Article 159 of the Constitution of Kenya. It establishes the Judiciary as an independent custodian of justice in Kenya. The Judiciary developed a Judiciary Transformation Framework that has placed it on the path of institutional transformation. In Kenya to a large extent many of the building construction works still rely heavily on manual labour in their assembly. Therefore, this research attempts to establish the cause of delays in delivery of court projects within stipulated time, in Western, Nyanza and Rift Valley which accounts for 50% of the stalled projects. The purpose of the study was to determine the factors influencing completion of the construction of court projects in judiciary which impacts on delays in justice delivery. This study reviewed the following theories; Management Theory, Theory of performance and Resource-based view theory. Further the conceptual framework measured resource availability, staff competency, monitoring and evaluation and stakeholder participation. In order to achieve its objectives the study used descriptive design allows the researcher to gather information, summarize, present and interpret data, with the target population of 189 the researcher sampled 123 respondents by using the Krejcie & Morgan sample model. Data was collected majorly by use of questionnaires and data analysis was analyzed by SPSS to come up with mean and percentages, the study also employed use of multiple regressions and also utilized correlation. The findings established that 73.03% of the respondents were male while 26.97% of the respondents were female, the study also found out that 44.9% were Administrators within the Judiciary, this was followed by 26.97% who were procurement officers, 20.22% were court clerks and the least were stakeholders who accounted for 7.87% of the respondents. The findings indicate that 95.51% of the respondents indicated in the affirmative that they were aware of construction projects within their areas of judicial jurisdiction while only 4.49% indicated in the negative that they had not seen nor being aware of construction projects in their areas. The findings also revealed that resource availability overall mean index posted by resource availability and its influence on completion of construction projects was 3.3, competency of staff was 3.60, mean for monitoring and evaluation was found to be 3.65 and that of for stakeholder‘s participation was 4.10. The researcher also conducted a multiple regression the findings indicate that when the intervening variable is left out the fitted model was: Y= 6.981 +0. 193X1+0. 071X2+0. 064X3 -0.063X4 and it is included the fitted model is Y= 5.667 + 0. 165X1- 0.009X2+ 0. 001X3 -0.051X4+ 0.330X5. The study therefore, concludes and recommends as follows; first, Resource availability is necessary and approval processes should be followed in order to complete the construction of projects within the stipulated time. Secondly, a well-structured and competent staff force will aid the effective services through the integration of activities involved in the process of construction, Thirdly, respondents agreed that Monitoring and evaluation will hasten the implementation of the magistrates court projects on time and lastly, the culture that contributes to the implementation of the project would be planning that which was not favourable in the past. Therefore, the magistrate‘s courts needs to urgently address the issue of completion of projects as an equal arm of government in order to be able to proceed without unprecedented challenges that affect the positive outcome of the projects.