Civil servants attached to the Nyandarua North Sub County have cried foul after they were directed to relocate to Ndaragwa town to ease service delivery.
Led by the Union of Kenya Civil Servants (UKCS) Nyandarua Branch Secretary General Moses Maina Njoroge, the officers termed the hurried directive as meant to curtail their efforts to have the Public Service Commission classify Ndaragwa as a hardship area.
“This is a semi-arid place that has little development with extremely harsh conditions. We were given a three day notice that expires today to move our offices from Nyahururu town to Ndaragwa Township, which is quite little time.
There are no services at Ndaragwa as the area has just a single dispensary, no chemists with no houses to accommodate our officers,” said Maina.
The secretary general added that Ndaragwa, that has most of its land still gazetted as forest land, also lacked basic amenities such as schools, clean water and banking services that were crucial for their well-being.
“The timing is wrong as this will mean we move with our children in the middle of their school term, with a number expected to sit their national examinations come November,” added Eunice Wanjira, the UKCS gender representative noting that they are now forced to commute daily to the township 33 kilometers from Nyahururu town.
She also noted that the area was immensely forested with very little development going on, therefore forcing the civil servants to endure hard working conditions.
Wanjira called on the national and county governments to heed to their plight and suggested that allocation of hardship and disturbance allowances would remedy their situation.
Offices at the once Nyandarua County headquarters in Nyahururu remained vacant with Nyandarua North DCC Walter Ngaira directing his heads of departments to hasten the relocation to “ease service delivery.”
“It has been observed that some of you (heads of departments) are still operating from Nyahururu. This is to direct that you move to enhance service delivery to the public,” read in part, a notice on the notice board at the entrance of the recently renovated two-storeyed building.
The situation at the new offices at Ndaragwa was deplorable as the officers heaped files dating back in 1963 on the floor of the unfurnished building. A police truck was deployed to help the officers relocate to the unlit rooms with low morale observed among the officers who had complied with the directive.
By Desire Waithaka and Paul Kinuthia
