Machakos County is simmering with unrest as junior staff at the County Assembly continue to endure a crippling financial nightmare, their salaries withheld in what appears to be a blatant act of political victimization orchestrated by Governor Wavinya Ndeti’s inner circle.
While senior executives and the County Executive have comfortably collected their paychecks, the rank-and-file employees, those who keep the day-to-day operations alive, have been callously abandoned to suffer the consequences of a bitter power struggle they had no hand in creating.
The root cause is said to be a standoff over the impeachment of the current County Assembly Speaker, Ann Kiusya, a move aggressively championed by Governor Ndeti and her loyalists.
Some MCAs led by Machakos Central representative Nicholas Nzioka Wangondi recently declared their intention to remove Kiusya, accusing her of incompetence and derailing the Assembly’s development agenda.
Sources close to the Assembly reveal a dark political chess game where junior staffers have become collateral damage, denied their rightful earnings as punishment for their perceived allegiance or, worse, for refusing to toe the pro-Wavinya line.
This toxic political atmosphere has unleashed an insidious culture of discrimination within the county government, where junior staff who dare to question the governor’s agenda or who fail to sing praises to her leadership find themselves sidelined and their livelihoods hanging precariously in the balance.
“Hi Cyprian. Kindly highlight the plight of we, the Machakos County Assembly junior staff, who have gone unpaid due to failure by the County Assembly to impeach the current Speaker (Ann Kiusya) as directed by the Governor, Hon. Wavinya Ndeti. The county executive and all senior employees have already been paid, but we, the junior staff, have to suffer for sins we know nothing about.”
