Nearly half of the employees of the Kenyatta University Teaching Referral and Research Hospital (KUTRRH) are from one ethnic community in breach of a legal requirement for diversity in the sharing of jobs in public service institutions.
A report of the Auditor-General tabled in Parliament says 285 of the hospital’s 608 employees are from one community, representing 46 percent of the jobs.
The dominance of the undisclosed tribe is in breach of the National Cohesion and Integration Act, 2008, which bars a single community from occupying more than a third of employment positions in State-owned firms.
“This is contrary to section 7(1) and (2) of the National Cohesion and Integration Act, 2008 which states that all offices shall seek to represent the diversity of the people of Kenya in the employment of staff and that no public institution shall have more than one-third of its staff establishment from the same community,” Nancy Gathungu, the Auditor-General, said.
She said the management sought to explain that the imbalance was triggered by rushed hiring when the hospital was declared a National Covid-19 Treatment and Isolation Centre.
The hospital reckons it was required to quickly recruit, train and deploy staff to the treatment and isolation areas, making it difficult to balance the ethnic distribution of staff during the initial years of KUTRRH operations.
