A human resources report by the management consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) into staffing at Nairobi City Council (NCC) has concluded that 92 per cent of the Council’s 11,392 employees are ‘incompetent’! The report is damning in the extreme but the damned Teflon-coated leaders of the NCC, certainly not the ambitious Town Clerk Philip Kisia, aren’t letting any of the blame for this ridiculous state of affairs stick to them.

The PwC report delivered at the end of last week found that more than nine-out-of-ten City Hall employees were either semi-skilled or unskilled, a fact that seriously impairs the Council’s efficiency. More than half of NCC employees never progressed beyond primary school education.

SACK 7,000

For a Council where 70 per cent of its expenditure goes on staff costs, about Sh580 million per month, the PwC report estimates that some 3,676 of those currently employed are surplus to requirements.

To in any way meet the requirements of becoming a County administration the NCC would be advised to sack up to 7,716 of its existing workforce who will not be relevant to the new devolved structure, says PwC, and replace them with 3,734 new recruits who are competent to do the job.

To cover a city of up to four million inhabitants, NCC has only seven planners, four electrical engineers and 96 firemen (of whom only 20 are on duty at any given time).

NCC’S ‘GHOST WORKERS’

This report comes on top of a PwC report from June 2010 that found over 4,000 NCC employees had ‘questionable employment records’ and that many were ‘ghost workers’ who simply did not exist but someone was drawing their pay! (See Forum posting, ‘Spooky but true…the ghost workers of NCC’, 9 Sept. 2010).

“IMPLEMENTATION WILL TAKE TIME”

So, were the leaders of the NCC shocked at the findings of the PwC report? Have they leapt into action to address the problems highlighted forthwith? Do they accept any blame?

Well, no, they’ve never leapt into action before and they’re not going to start now. Urgency in their response was only marked by its absence, and of course, it’s not their fault our capital city’s administration is so execrable.

“Implementation will take some time”, said Town Clerk Philip Kisia. “We will need to study it carefully and consult widely”.

“The good news is 25 per cent of our staff is over 50”, said Kisia in response to the PwC report, “They will home anyway and there should be no cause for alarm”, he continued.

So that’s alright then.

Not that Philip Kisia will be around to implement the report’s proposals. He’s stand down from the position of NCC Town Clerk at the end of this month to then stand on his record and run for Governor of the new, devolved, Nairobi County. “My interaction with residents makes me most qualified to continue serving them in a higher portfolio”, the Standard quoted him as saying in early April of this year.

The problem is, Mr Kisia really does believe his own words.