Elachi: Spread out county staff to promote cohesion
Public Service and Gender Chief Administrative secretary (CAS) Beatrice Elachi yesterday called for a review of devolution laws to allow for delocalisation and rotation of human resources in counties.
Elachi said the move would bolster productivity in counties by enhancing diversity and peace and cohesion among different communities and cultures.
She told the third annual Kenya School of Government’s (KSG) Conference of Human Resource practitioners at the Mombasa campus that the senate needs to re-look into the devolution laws and restructure them to pave way for delocalisation of staff.
“Devolution is now 10 years. I think it is best now to sit down as a country and look at the whole structure of human resources in county governments and ask ourselves, will it be fair for Kenyans to work in one county where they have been employed for their entire life? It is imperative that the Senate restructure laws to give Kenyans an opportunity to work in any county in the same way we talk about health workers and teachers,” the CAS said.
Also Read:
Too hot
Elachi observed that the current human resources situation in county governments did not encourage professionalism.
“Delocalisation will ensure that we appreciate that there is diversity whereby you can appreciate working with a Taita or a Giriama when you are in Nyeri for the purposes of ensuring that we are a united country. One of the challenges we have as Kenyans is that we wait until the situation is too hot, that is when we start running to rectify it,” said Elachi.
Emerging trends
If the situation is left they way it is, she said, the country’s diversity would be highly affected in future.
“In 20 years, if we don’t address this matter, we will have a very different country. We will have professionals believing in their divided cultures,” explained Elachi.
She added: “Because it is public service, it is for every Kenyan and that is why every Kenyan is allowed to live anywhere and get services whenever they need them.”
During the conference organised by KSG’s Institute of Human Resource Management, participants were also told that emerging trends affecting the human resource management in the public service could force a paradigm shift in the future employment.
Kenya School of Government Director General Ludeki Chweya said in future academic qualifications alone will not guarantee employment in the public service.
Other than academic achievements, he said, the public service will also assess issues like attitude, temperament and character of job applicants before hiring them.
“Beyond the academic qualifications, we will also interrogate whether you can peacefully coexist with others in a working environment or you have enough wisdom or is there a chance that you can jeopardise the duties assigned in one way or another.
“Now we have computer software and psychometric testing systems that can help us assess an individual’s temperament. At the KSG we recently acquired one and in fact there is one CEO we recruited recently for a certain institution in the government and we took the candidates through the psychometric tests and we believe we took the guy with the right temperament,” Chweya said.
