Nearly half of City Hall staff are old workers

About a half of Nairobi County government employees are aged 50 and above with most set for retirement soon, a report has revealed.

The biometric study, whose release had been delayed by more than four months, gave City Hall a clean bill of health in terms of ghost workers.

The report showed that of the 11,603 workforce, a whopping 5,709 are 50 years old and above, out of which 19 are above the retirement age of 60.

Despite the acute youth unemployment in the country, the report reveals that the county has only hired 792 of them, representing 14 percent of the entire workforce.

A total of 2,712 workers are aged between 55 and 59, 2,978 between 50 and 54 years, while another 2,663 are between 45 and 49 years.

Those aged 40 to 44 are 1,757, while below 40 years are 1,474 out of which 682 are between 35 and 39 years.

Of the 792 youth, 621 are aged between 30 and 34 and 171 below 30 years old.

MISSING

While releasing the report on Wednesday, City Hall acting County Secretary Leboo Morintat said that more than half of the workforce are women accounting for 6,118 and 5,485 are men.

Mr Morintat said that while the total number of employees differs with the payroll register as at April 2019, the 385 workers missing in the biometric report can be accounted for.

The April register indicated that City Hall had 11,988 employees. The report states that 385 of them were not registered during the biometric listing exercise.

Of these 200 retired between April and November, another 85 are training oversees, 58 are on suspension due to disciplinary case, and 23 are deceased.

Another 11 employees resigned during the period under review.

STAFF IDENTIFICATION

The biometric registration was launched by Governor Mike Sonko in May with the aim of weeding out the ghost workers and imposters.

The county also deployed an employee self-service module that centralises workers services and helps the public to identify City Hall staff.

“The system will be able to weed out staff impersonating through the use of biometrics, physical identification card and the SMS verification process. Only the biometrically verified staff will be on the system and should be holders of the high secure identification card,” said Mr Morintat.

He pointed out that Nairobi residents can now verify the identities of county staff by sending a unique identification number issued to every employee, displayed on their uniform, to short code number 40471 where a response message indicating whether the employee is a genuine county staff will be received.

“In case the person being verified is a genuine county staff the reverse SMS will contain his or her biodata and a URL link to his/her digital information complete with his/her picture where one will be able to compare the physical look and the picture on the system,” he said.

But in the case that the person is not a county employee, the reverse SMS will indicate so and the member of public is urged to report such cases through the provided 0725624489 hotline or contact the nearest County Enforcement office or the police.