It is wrong to compare PS tribes to national population

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

06 November 2022

I have seen a message posted on the internet social media showing the tribal distribution of the recently nominated Principal Secretaries (PSs). The percentages are compared to each of the tribe’s proportion of the population. It shows that, for example, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin have 25.5 per cent of the nominees each while they are 17.2 and 12.9 per cent of the population respectively.

On the other hand, the Kamba got 7.8 per cent of the posts yet they account for 10 per cent of the population. In addition, no one from the Kisii tribe was nominated yet they are 5.7 per cent of the population.

I must admit that I have not checked the correctness of this data for two reasons: first, I don’t think it is important and, secondly, Kenya has never clearly defined the meaning of “tribe”. There are some who say that Kalenjin, Luhya, and Somali, for example, are not tribes. There is also the question of how many tribes there are – I wrote about that in 2016 and established that, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, the number is 114!

The writer of the message about PS nominees missed a very important point: that, unlike Cabinet Secretaries, Principal Secretaries are not appointed out of thin air. The jobs are advertised and any Kenyan who feels qualified is free to apply. The applicants are then shortlisted and interviewed by the Public Service Commission. The names of those deemed most suitable are sent to the president and, by law, he can only select PSs from that list.

Clearly then, if no one from a particular tribe applied, then it has zero chance of nomination. It follows, therefore, that comparing the tribal distribution of nominees to the national population is wrong. The correct point of reference is the list of applicants.

The Public Service Commission published the names of applicants at the beginning of the process. That list did not show the tribes; it only indicated the Counties. I presume that the county was what appears in the identity cards. Now, that can be misleading: for example, is a Kikuyu born in, say, Uasin Gishu, considered a Kalenjin?

For this reason, when enumerating tribes, the bureau of statistics follows the principle that your tribe is what you say it is. By the same token, perhaps parliament should ask the nominees to state their tribes when introducing themselves during vetting. That’s the only way we can verify the tribal distribution.