Nairobi MPs have faulted Defence Cabinet Secretary Soipan Tuya over what they termed ‘vastly unfair’ clustering of the upcoming Kenya Defence Forces recruitment, even as they threatened to censure her.
Led by Senator Edwin Sifuna, the six Nairobi MPs including, Beatrice Elachi (Dagoreti North) Mark Mwenje (Embakasi West), Felix Odiwuor aka Jalango (Langata) Julius Mawathe (Embakasi South) and Amos Mwago (Starehe), yesterday threatened to seek legal redress over the recruitment, saying the county should be treated as the 46 others, where it should be held in the sub-county level.
They said the clustering may disadvantage youth in Nairobi, and create an avenue for corruption, with possibilities of people from other counties coming in to participate.
The MPs said they wrote a demand letter to the CS on September 16, giving her seven days for corrective action but she has not responded. Mwenje said they will pursue all avenues, including going to court to stop the entire exercise.
“Nairobi has the biggest youth population and the problem of unemployment bites the hardest here. You have seen that even our young men are falling into the trap of being hired as goons to do things that they should not be doing. This is an opportunity for them to also get formal employment. It is therefore very unfair that we are being treated differently from the other 46 counties,” Sifuna said in yesterday.
“The recruitment is happening at the county level and that allows even members of that constituency to see who has come for that recruitment, it is easier to fight corruption when you are able to see someone is say from Mathare, another is from Dagoretti North or from Dagoretti South and so forth. But when you cluster all of us into just three venues, people will even come from Machakos because it is not far, and nobody can tell that this person is not from maybe Embakasi South,” he added.
Mwenje added: “If this does not stop, we will stop recruitment of KDF in the country. Kenya Police Service is doing recruitment in 17 constituencies, why is it that KDF does not want to do the same? We are going to take this matter to the floor and if need be to the courts.”
Ms Elachi said the CS needs to personally intervene and ensure Nairobi youth get what they termed as their fair share and wondered why Nairobi is being given a different treatment.
“I think what the CS has to tell us is, where do you name the cluster in Nairobi? How will you know this number has come from constituency A, constituency B, to the 17th constituency, we continue discriminating Nairobi, and this is how you find now corruption coming in. This is how you hear people telling you, we paid money. We are the largest county, we carry all the burdens of everyone but when it comes to the goodies of government, Nairobi is always discriminated on many things,” Elachi said.
