By Asingo Wilson, National Organizing Secretary, Union of Kenya Civil Servants (UKCS)
There is something fundamentally wrong with a government system in which workers can report for duty, perform their responsibilities, serve the public and yet have no certainty about when they will receive their salaries.
The continuing delay in payment of salaries to Nairobi County employees should therefore not be treated as another routine administrative inconvenience.
It is a governance failure.
And more importantly, it is a failure for which workers should not be made to pay.
When government finances become strained, workers are too often turned into the shock absorbers of the problem. Salaries are delayed, employees borrow to survive, landlords wait, school fees accumulate, bills go unpaid and penalties pile up.
The government may describe this as a cash-flow challenge.
For the worker, it is a household crisis.
A salary is not simply an accounting entry on a county government spreadsheet. It is money that has already been earned through labour. It pays for food, housing, education, transport, healthcare and the basic dignity of family life.
That is why the question confronting Nairobi County should not simply be: How do we pay July or August salaries?
The bigger question is: Why does a county government repeatedly reach a point where it cannot guarantee payment for work that has already been performed?
Nairobi’s current predicament has been linked to the budget approval and funding process, including the return of the county budget by the Controller of Budget. These are serious institutional and fiscal matters that must be addressed.
But they cannot become an excuse for shifting the consequences onto ordinary employees.
Workers did not cause the budgetary disagreement.
They did not return the county budget.
They did not determine the timing of equitable-share disbursements.
And they certainly did not decide how the county manages its payroll.
Yet they are the first to suffer when those systems fail.
This is precisely why Nairobi needs to stop treating salary delays as isolated emergencies requiring temporary fixes.
Interestingly, the Nairobi City County Assembly has previously considered and approved a payroll-support arrangement intended to cushion employees against cash-flow disruptions. The Assembly’s own record recognised that salary delays have occurred repeatedly, particularly around financial-year transitions and delays in equitable-share disbursements.
That should tell us something important.
If the same problem keeps returning, then it is no longer an accident. It is a system problem.
A bank facility can bridge a cash-flow gap; it cannot cure a broken payroll system.
Borrowing may provide temporary relief. It does not answer the fundamental questions of payroll planning, cash-flow forecasting, expenditure prioritisation and institutional accountability.
Nairobi therefore needs a permanent County Payroll Management Framework.
Such a framework should guarantee a ring-fenced monthly wage bill, a protected payroll reserve, stronger integration between HRIS and IFMIS, a predictable salary-payment calendar and an early-warning mechanism capable of identifying cash-flow risks before they become workers’ problems.
There must also be a clear principle governing county finances:
Salaries for work already performed must be treated as a priority obligation.
Political disagreements, administrative failures and budgetary disputes cannot be allowed to punish employees who have already reported to work and delivered public services.
The irony is particularly striking in Nairobi.
This is Kenya’s capital city and its economic nerve centre. It hosts national institutions, multinational corporations, diplomatic missions and some of the country’s most sophisticated financial operations.
Yet its own public employees can find themselves wondering when their next salary will arrive.
That contradiction should concern every policymaker.
But Nairobi is not alone.
Salary delays and cash-flow pressures are symptoms of a wider problem confronting county governments across the country. The details may differ from one county to another, but the underlying question is similar: Have counties built financial and payroll systems capable of protecting workers from predictable fiscal disruptions?
If the answer is no, then we are dealing with a national governance problem.
The solution must therefore bring together county executives, county assemblies, the Controller of Budget, the National Treasury and workers’ unions.
They must stop meeting only when salaries have already been delayed.
They should establish a permanent mechanism that identifies impending cash-flow pressures, protects the wage bill and guarantees workers timely payment.
Workers should not have to threaten industrial action every time they want what is rightfully theirs.
They should not have to borrow money to survive because government has failed to plan.
They should not have to call politicians, union officials or county administrators to ask when they will be paid.
And they should never be treated as collateral damage in a dispute over public finances.
The debate about Nairobi’s delayed salaries must therefore become bigger than Nairobi.
It is about what kind of government we want.
A government that tells workers to be patient whenever its systems fail?
Or a government that accepts that paying workers on time is one of its most basic obligations?
We should choose the latter.
Because when a government cannot guarantee the timely payment of salaries, it is not merely inconveniencing its employees.
It is transferring the cost of its own institutional failures to families that can least afford to carry it.
Workers deserve certainty. They deserve dignity. And above all, they deserve to be paid on time for work they have already done.
The time has come to fix the system — once and for all.
