Kisii County governor Simba Arati asked for Ksh10 million from the county’s supplementary budget to verify the academic certificates of county employees and weed out ghost workers.
The governor lamented that most county employees provided fake certificates when he subjected them to a headcount at the start of his tenure.
According to the County Public Service Board, Kisii county has 5,900 employees, who Arati claims possess fake academic certificates.
“I know it will be difficult. The funds will be used for certificate verification.”
“We will need to obtain the correct grades that they received,” Arati announced on November 28 while defending the outrageous amount.
He planned to use the funds to apply for certificate validation from exam bodies indicated to have awarded the certificates.
The first-term governor bemoaned that the county was using a lot of resources meant for development to pay ghost workers.
“We need to reduce our wage bill by ensuring the right people are paid.
"The wage bill is excessive and eating into our development budget,” Arati remarked.
On September 3, 2022, Simba Arati announced that preliminary investigations showed that the county had 813 ghost workers.
“We have 861 Ghost workers who are earning money without working for it,” Arati announced back then.
Earlier on August 31, 2022, he complained that the county had an unjustified bloated wage bill.
“The county is paying 256 drivers when only 82 vehicles are available, this is unacceptable and we must stamp it out,” he complained.
