Simba Arati
By Wanja Waweru
Two mortuary attendants who are alleged to have accepted bribes in exchange for providing services that are provided without charge at the facility have been fired by Kisii governor Simba Arati.
The outspoken governor claimed that the two workers received payment from the deceased to prepare and clean the remains.
“Can you imagine these two employees that I just sent home, have been receiving the money to clean bodies, and yet we pay them? They are getting money from the dead. Who does that? What kind of corruption is this?” he posed.
The county executive also made a suggestion that he fired the morgue staff in response to public uproar.
The governor went on to brag that he had replaced the two with some of the best mortuary staff in the nation.
Additionally, he charged that the fired workers had placed more than 200 bodies in a mortuary that could barely hold 72.
Arati, who formerly represented Dagorreti in Nairobi’s parliament, is not using county employees for the first time.
Arati once famously ordered all county automobiles to be lined up across the Gusii stadium with each driver standing next to the car he drives in an effort to decongest what he believed was an overworked workforce.
His audit of the county’s human resources revealed that, out of the 5,600 employees, 1314 were “ghost workers” who did not show up for the two-month headcount.
In another incident, Arati allocated Shh10 million from the county’s supplementary budget to verify the academic certificates of all county employees in a bid to weed out the ghost workers.
