Only 15 Nairobi City County employees workers are under 30 years

  City council askaris collect the clothes of a hawker who was allegedly shot on the head and died by a policeman while busy selling his clothes near khoja mosque, Nairobi.Mr. peter maina was hawker and a part time preacher in Nairobi.PHOTO BY: MBUGUA KIBERA  

Despite campaigns by both the national and county governments to empower the youth, it has emerged that only 15 Nairobi City County (NCC) employees, out of a workforce of 14,000 are aged below 30 years!

Speaking to The Nairobian at his City Hall office, Deputy Governor Jonathan Mueke admitted that this was a serious issue, since a majority of Nairobi’s residents are young.

“It is a big issue. There are a lot of sick leaves in the various wards as many employees are aged,” he revealed.

The deputy governor says that during the recent survey of government workers, he asked all sub-county administrators to give him a report on the status of the workforce in the wards.

“What came out is that eight per cent of the people who work at the sub-counties were, besides suspension and incompetence, too old or too sick to work”, he reveals.

Hiring relatives

City Hall froze the hiring of workers in the 1990s after it emerged that some members of staff were using unethical methods to have their relatives employed.

“Many retiring employees would conspire with their seniors so that their positions could be filled by their children or relatives,” explained a retired NCC worker who requested anonymity. “This led to the sneaking in of incompetent people in the system and the generation of hundreds of ghost workers. We are optimistic that the new biometric registration system will weed out this rot from the past.”

The then Nairobi City Council had a system of informing potential retirees of their impeding retirement through their payslips. If one had a year to go, the bottom of the payslip would read, “You have 12 months to retirement.”

The objective was for the employees to make arrangements and put their house in order pending their exit from the job market.

However, some continued turning up in the office even after retirement, which could explain the genesis of ghost workers and the large number of old people milling around City Hall.

Excessive workforce

The officer in charge of personnel policy and implementation, Leboo ole Morindat, says that after realising that there were skewed hiring processes, and that they had an excessive workforce, the then Nairobi City Council stopped hiring new employees in the 1990s.

“That is why most of the workers are old,” he explains.  “Right now, we are assessing the workforce and establishing who is retiring when with an intention of hiring younger people. To address the aging workforce problem, the county is assessing and evaluating its employees with the intention of injecting new blood.”

Morindat adds that the county has an ambitious ‘digitisation’ programme and will require hiring younger staff or training the old guard on basic computer skills.

John Karani (not his real name) is a 35-year-old who got employed at the NCC 15 years ago. He says that as a young man working among mostly old people, the biggest challenge is that they overly rely on you to do many things.

“I started as a guard before being promoted to an office job, since I had some formal training. But the tragedy is that my salary still reflects that I am a guard,” he complained.

“Besides this, you find that the older people rely on you because most are not tech savvy and don’t understand a lot of stuff about computing.”

He adds, however, that he loves his job because it is flexible and the reporting and leaving time are not very strict, allowing him time to do “other things.”