State House demands ethnic balance

State House will be asking ministries that second staff to the department to observe ethnic balancing, a senior official said.

Comptroller Nelson Githinji on Thursday said that State House was not directly responsible for posting staff to the official residence of the President, which has been cited as one of the departments that do not observe ethnic diversity.

“State House employees are ordinarily seconded from relevant ministries depending on the requirements of the department at any one time,” he said.

“The secondments are flexible and are determined by the technical and other professional requirements of the State Houses or Lodges located in various parts of the country.”

Dr Githinji was reacting to a report by the National Commission and Integration Commission (NCIC), which disclosed that 45 per cent of State House jobs were occupied by “a single community”. (READ: Shock of Kenya ruled by ethnicity)

Commission boss Mzalendo Kibunjia did not name the ethnic group that has the biggest share of these jobs.

The report said State House was among 10 government ministries and departments defying the law that requires that no single ethnic group should constitute more than a third of the staff in any docket.

Separately, the director of the Kenya Institute of Administration, Prof Margaret Kobia, dismissed the NCIC report, saying it ignored many aspects of a competent survey.

For example, she said, the commission gave the impression that all people from all ethnic groups wished to work with the public service.

She called for a deeper analysis of the data to establish the actual reasons for the disparities in the government’s workforce.

“We must be careful in the way we make judgments based on the report,” Prof Kobia said.

Meanwhile, fresh data showed that nearly 70 per cent of civilian jobs in the Department of Defence are occupied by people from four ethnic groups.

The data released by Dr Kibunjia showed that staff from the Kikuyu community make up 28.6 per cent of the 2,239 civilian jobs in the Defence docket.

The Kamba form 16.8 per cent of the total number of workers in the department, the Luhya 13 per cent and the Luo 10 per cent.

Dr Kibunjia said the commission would not release the names of the community staffing representation for military jobs for security reasons.

He clarified that the document released on Wednesday was only a summary of the main report that will be released soon.