Gender Chief Administrative Secretary Beatrice Elachi is reported to have orchestrated irregular promotions at Nairobi County Assembly during her tenure as Speaker, an assembly committee has heard.Acting Clerk Adah Onyango told the Justice and Legal Affairs committee that Elachi mostly acted in her capacity as the speaker and not as chairperson of the Nairobi County Assembly Service Board in correspondences during the process in 2020.
This even as the then-acting Clerk Monica Muthami also threw Elachi under the bus, but indicating she did not take part in the promotions exercise.While making her submissions before the Kahawa Ward MCA Joseph Komu-led committee, Ms Onyango said the promotions were done irregularly and outside the provisions of the law.She said the Board went on an illegal venture and promoted officers in a skewed manner with the same not done across the board as anticipated by the Public Service regulations.
Further, the Board created job scales that do not fall within the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) pointers as well as the IPPD payroll system.This resulted in officers being promoted, some of them to positions that were not existing or positions that had not been budgeted for occasioning usage of funds in programs that had not been approved or been budgeted for.“Chairman to this extent, this exercise was not in conformity with the law and hence illegal. It was conducted in an irregular manner,” said Ms Onyango.
The acting clerk pointed out that Section 24 of the County Assembly Services, Act provides a roadmap to be used by the Board if it intends to review the organizational structure of the service.Granted, the Board in 2017, via that road map, engaged Deloitte & Touche for their input.Deloitte would provide a report on their findings and this was adopted by the Board and implementation of the same began.
However, before the process was concluded, there were certain hiccups at the county assembly and that exercise was shelved.Nonetheless, instead of continuing with the process after its revival, Ms Onyango submitted that the direction was changed and instead of following the direction anticipated by the Act, Ms Elachi and the Board went out of the provisions of the law and decided to undertake a parallel programme not provided for in the law.
“That exercise brought a lot of disharmony and disunity within the county assembly service. Something that still obtains to date because the issues have not been resolved,” she said.
Further, the committee heard that the Ms Elachi’s-led Board completely ignored the SRC who are supposed to advice in any case of an organisational review, going ahead to implement one at the assembly.
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