Kaparo to audit ethnic fitness of Uhuru’s appointments

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) will conduct a staff audit to establish whether recent central government hiring and executive appointments breached regional balance limits. NCIC chair Francis ole Kaparo said yesterday that the agency would review appointments made by President Uhuru Kenyatta, Cabinet secretaries and the Public Service Commission under the Jubilee administration.

This comes amid concern by the opposition Cord that executive appointments have been skewed in favour of people from the home turfs of Mr Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto.

The National Cohesion and Integration Act requires that no single ethnic community should constitute more than one-third of staff in any ministry, government department or public institution, bringing also into sharp focus the hiring of staff in counties.

“The audit in the counties has been ongoing and we hope to complete this soon and embark on auditing the central government,” said Mr Kaparo at a Press briefing in Nairobi.

“If we find that the president has done so (breached regional balance requirement) in some of the executive appointments then I will also tell him because that is my job,” Mr Kaparo said.

NCIC is mandated to promote cohesion in the country by addressing causes of ethnic discrimination, negative ethnicity as well as unequal distribution of resources and opportunities. He explained that an audit of the central government was crucial because imbalance in appointments was likely to cause conflicts along tribal lines.

Mr Kaparo said that the review will capture employment trends in the past three years, given the last audit was done in 2011.

“People are continuously leaving the service, some are dying and new appointments are being made, it is therefore paramount to keep up to date audits and publicise them to enforce compliance to the law,” he said

Sacking of employees

The 2011 ethnic audit revealed that five communities; the Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Luhya, Kamba and Luo occupied nearly 70 per cent of civil service employment.

It also indicated that half of Kenya’s ethnic groups were only marginally represented in the civil service with State House and the ministries of Transport, Public Works, Tourism, Local Government, Higher Education and Nairobi Metropolitan having more than a third of staff from a single community.

Mr Kaparo noted that rather than recommend the sacking of employees found to be largely from one ethnic community, the commission would recommend that future employment address the situation making the rectification process longer.

“It is difficult to ask for people to be sacked because they belong to a majority tribe because even they have a right to work and the security of that position if they have done nothing wrong,” he said.