Almost half of staff at Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral and Research Hospital are from one ethnic community, a Parliamentary committee has learnt.
National Assembly’s Committee on National Cohesion and Equal Opportunity was on Tuesday told that 46.23 per cent of staff at the facility (649 out of the total 1,404) are from one tribe.
Appearing before the committee, KUTRH CEO Ahmed Dagane nonetheless said the hospital has managed to recruit from 27 ethnic groups out of the 45 tribes “in an effort to have a Kenyan representation of the hospital.”
Committee chair Yusuf Adan Haji urged the facility to make a deliberate effort to consider employing staff from other regions in future recruitments.
“The hospital should have the face of Kenya. Having the facility dominated by one community is against the law,” he stated.
Dagane said the facility witnessed an influx of patients at the height of the pandemic as it had been identified as a National Covid-19 Centre.
"At this point, the hospital was in its initial stages of operationalisation with limited staffing. The situation necessitated the urgent and immediate hiring of health professionals and other staff on the basis of merit and immediate availability,” he explained.
He said the applicants who were available on short notice were mostly from neighbouring counties.
“The pandemic necessitated the hospital to hire a lot of casuals on short term contracts who were available at short notice,” he added.
The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) Act, 2008 prohibits a single community from occupying more than a third of employment positions in State-owned firms.
Section 7 of the NCIC Act states that, “No public establishment shall have more than one-third of its staff from the same ethnic community.”
Section 7(1) and (2) of the Act 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 from the same community.
