A Member of Parliament (MP) and some applicants for teaching jobs in Machakos County have urged the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) to cancel the recruitment process due to alleged irregularities.
Yatta MP Robert Basil has implored the TSC Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr Nancy Macharia to intervene and repeat the exercise of recruitment to ensure that it is done fairly.
Basil blamed the Machakos County office for overseeing a flawed recruitment exercise that locked out many candidates. He demanded a fresh exercise be done and be overseen by a new independent county director who will ensure fairness.
The MP alleged that most local teachers’ missed out on chances of recruitment due to people not from the region taking their jobs.
Some of the affected teachers threatened to demonstrate over the process which they viewed as a sham.
Through their representative, the teachers spoke to members of the media in Machakos Town where they blamed the Commission for poor leadership in the County.
They argued that most of them who had graduated between 2011 and 2012 had been left out despite being qualified.
In their view, the exercise was manipulated to favour a few individuals and they now want TSC to intervene and have the exercise revoked and redone.
The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) officials from the area also raised concerns about the recruitment process.
Yatta KNUT branch Assistant Treasurer Richard Kitaka said that the exercise was ‘an abuse to the applicants’. He proceeded to call for justice to be done for all applicants and said that this could only be done of the process is redone.
The TSC County Director acknowledged having received some complaints in his office but stopped short of commenting on whether the recruitment process would be repeated or not.