EXPERT COMMENT

SAMUEL KOBIA: Ethnic balance is a must in public jobs

NCIC is carrying out ethnic audit in all levels of government to get real picture of representation of communities.

In Summary
  • I have written to governors who have not complied with ethnic balance.
  • We are soon doing ethnic balance of national government institutions.
NCIC chairman Samuel Kobia
NCIC chairman Samuel Kobia
Image: FILE

As the National Cohesion and Integration Commission, we launched our ethnic report of the counties and came up with a lot of revelations of what is happening there.

I have written to all the 47 governors, particularly of those counties that were not in compliance with the 30 per cent ethnic representation law.

The next ethnic audit we are going to do is for parastatals, national institutions, state agencies and public universities.

The final audit will be the ethnic composition of the national government.

We will come out with the report that will give the right picture of the ethnic diversity across all levels of government.

This is a scientific study we do as a commission and many of the governors have said we should help them know how to comply. We are working on that.

That is what we have been doing with the counties to ensure that they comply with the requirements of the law.

There have been suggestions of having a moratorium on hiring some overrepresented communities. There are situations where we say there should be no more hiring of this particular ethnic community. So, that is one of the ways we are going to ensure balance.

We are also going to work with those underrepresented or not represented at all, so that we tell the counties that they must have affirmative action.

We have shown governors clearly which ethnic community needs to be afforded affirmative action.

The truth is there are communities that have never been recruited in some public institutions.

As a commission we are stressing affirmative action and working with communities that are underrepresented to come up with something on what should be done so that we achieve equality.

We have to engage with the underrepresented communities so that they can clearly come up with suggestions on who they have, who are qualified, because also competence has be to be observed as one of the criteria for getting a job.

The imbalance in hiring is more political because some of the elected leaders, when they get into office, want to reward their supporters.

My commission will do all it can to rectify the situation.

NCIC chairperson spoke to the Star


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