Government sued over civil service retrenchment

The government is being sued in a bid to block the retrenchment of thousands of civil servants. The National Labour Party (NLP) chairman and former MP, Kennedy Kiliku, told the high court on Tuesday in Nairobi that civil service head Richard Leakey and the director of personnel management should suspend the lay-offs. Since the civil service reform programme began one month ago, according to a report by the Kenyan newspaper, ‘Daily Nation’, on Wednesday, about 19,000 civil servants had received retirement notices. In the first phase of the exercise, set for 15 September, 25,780 civil servants had been earmarked for retrenchment, with a total of 48,829 to be retired by June 2002. According to the report, Kiliku called this “wrongful act by the government” a threat to Kenya’s social fabric and family life. He went on to say that the money being paid to retrenched employees was “pitiful”, and accused the government of contravening the Employment Act by terminating employment contracts without adequate notice.