A Public Service Commission audit dated June 30, 2026, and seen by Business Daily, has laid bare a recruitment scandal inside the Office of the Attorney-General so brazen that candidates who never applied for jobs were appointed to them, while others without law degrees, Kenya School of Law diplomas or certificates of admission to the Bar were handed positions as State Counsel II. The rot did not begin with this audit. It was ordered by a court that, thirteen months earlier, had already found the same office guilty of an unconstitutional power grab. Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor now presides over an institution whose defining feature, fourteen months into a historic tenure, is not reform but repeated exposure.

THE QUACKS IN THE CHAMBERS

The numbers in the PSC report, signed by commission chairperson Francis Meja, read like an indictment of an institution that forgot its own rules existed. Eighteen candidates shortlisted for Legal Clerk Assistant IV positions and twenty-seven shortlisted for State Counsel II did not meet the qualifications advertised for the jobs they were being considered for. Fourteen Legal Clerk Assistant IV applicants and eight State Counsel II applicants surfaced in the process despite never appearing on the original long list, meaning they had not applied in the first place.

Seven people were appointed State Counsel II without a Bachelor of Laws degree, a postgraduate diploma from the Kenya School of Law, or admission as an advocate, the baseline credentials for anyone practising law in Kenya. Twelve Legal Clerk Assistant IV hires went through without mandatory computer proficiency certification.

Multiple versions of the applicant lists circulated internally, one recording qualifications and another stripping them out entirely, an inconsistency the commission’s report treats as evidence of a process built to obscure rather than document. The interview panel, according to the audit, never disclosed a pass mark, never ranked candidates, and never explained why the successful names were chosen over anyone else.

The final appointment list handed to the Attorney-General’s desk carried none of the scores, criteria or standards that were supposed to justify who got the job and who did not.

“There were candidates who were shortlisted, yet they did not meet the shortlisting criteria as per the advertisements and others were shortlisted yet they had not applied for the jobs as they were not in the long list.”

— Francis Meja, Chairperson, Public Service Commission, audit report dated June 30, 2026

This is not a technical office. State Counsel appointed through this process advise on multibillion-shilling government contracts, defend the Republic in complex commercial litigation, and support the state’s position in constitutional and arbitration disputes. An unqualified appointee sitting in that chair is not a paperwork problem.

It is a direct liability to the public purse, at a moment when court awards against the state had already more than doubled to approximately Sh44 billion by January 2025. The PSC’s own warning is unambiguous: unqualified appointments expose public funds to misuse and erode confidence in merit-based recruitment across government.

A POWER GRAB THE COURTS ALREADY KILLED

None of this happened in a vacuum. The recruitment exercise under scrutiny was advertised between April and June 2024, with the flagship State Counsel II vacancies opening on April 15 and closing on May 21 that year, in the same window Dorcas Oduor was stepping into office as Kenya’s first female Attorney-General. It ran under a legal architecture that a court would later strike down as unconstitutional.

On May 29, 2025, Justice Byram Ongaya of the Employment and Labour Relations Court quashed more than two hundred promotions carried out inside the Attorney-General’s office in late 2024, ruling that the exercise violated constitutional requirements on fair competition, merit, gender balance and ethnic diversity.

He went further, declaring unlawful the very instrument that had enabled the internal restructuring: amendments smuggled into the Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, 2024, which had created an Advisory Board chaired by the Attorney-General herself and handed it authority over recruitment, appointment, promotion, remuneration and discipline of State Counsel, functions that belong constitutionally to the Public Service Commission.

The court’s language left little room for charitable interpretation. The Advisory Board had no lawful authority to appoint or promote anyone. The attempt to detach the Attorney-General’s office from PSC oversight rested, in the court’s own words, on a misleading premise.

Justice Ongaya ordered the PSC to investigate the organisation, administration and personnel practices of the State Law Office, giving it until December 31, 2025 to report. That order produced the June 2026 audit now exposing ghost hires and unqualified counsel across the same office.

The pattern was not confined to internal recruitment.

A parallel move by the Attorney-General’s office to sideline the PSC in appointments to parastatals and public universities, executed through an advisory circular issued jointly with the State Corporations Advisory Committee, was separately struck down by the High Court in December 2025 as an unconstitutional attempt to centralise control. Two rulings, eighteen months apart, reached the identical conclusion: the Attorney-General’s chambers repeatedly tried to pull hiring and promotion power away from the constitutional body designed to police it, and the courts repeatedly said no.

HELD IN CONTEMPT, TWICE ACCUSED

The credibility problem has not stayed confined to personnel files.

In May and June 2026, the High Court issued conservatory orders halting a controversial, United States-linked Ebola quarantine and treatment facility under construction at Laikipia Airbase, pending determination of a constitutional petition filed by the Katiba Institute and the Law Society of Kenya. The petitioners argued the project had proceeded without adequate public participation, disclosure or constitutional safeguards.

Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale ignored the order.

On June 22, 2026, Justice Patricia Nyaundi found him in continuing contempt of court, ruling that he had convinced himself he could keep construction going by altering the composition of the actors on site rather than the substance of the conduct the court had barred.

Duale was summoned for sentencing, appeared the next day, apologised on the record, and confirmed under oath that construction had been halted. The court accepted his apology and discharged him with a warning.

Attorney-General Dorcas Oduor was named alongside Duale in the underlying contempt application, accused by Katiba Institute of failing, together with the Health CS, to comply with the court’s May 28 and June 2 directives and of withholding disclosure of the bilateral agreement with the United States that petitioners said President William Ruto himself had referenced in public remarks.

The court ultimately accepted the government’s position on the narrower disclosure dispute and declined to make a separate contempt finding against the Attorney-General on that limb, a technical reprieve that did little to soften the optics of Kenya’s chief legal officer standing twice this year in the same courtroom, on the same case, accused by two separate civil society organisations of defying binding judicial orders.

The episode fits a wider institutional posture. Since the government seal controversy of mid-2025, when Oduor was forced to publicly deny that the instrument of state authority had been appropriated by the Head of Public Service, her chambers have been characterised less by the reformist promise she articulated on appointment and more by a defensive crouch against accusations of constitutional overreach.

THE FORGED WILL THAT NAMED A LAW FIRM

Perhaps the most reputationally corrosive episode of Oduor’s tenure has nothing to do with her own appointments and everything to do with the company her office has had to keep in court. In a succession dispute over the estate of the late James Boro Karugu, Kenya’s second Attorney-General, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations concluded that a will and trust deed submitted for probate bore forged signatures, findings that implicated Peter Gachuhi, a senior partner at the elite firm Kaplan and Stratton, among six suspects in what the DPP has characterised as a coordinated criminal scheme.

Dorcas Oduor’s office entered the matter formally on February 17, 2026, filing grounds of opposition that dismissed a petition from Gachuhi and his co-petitioners as incompetent, misconceived and an abuse of court process, and arguing that a pending succession cause created no bar to criminal investigation and prosecution of forgery under the Penal Code.

They Attorney-General also opposed extending conservatory orders that had temporarily shielded the suspects from arrest.

The conflict-of-interest thread running through the case is difficult to ignore. Court papers show Kaplan and Stratton had previously represented Karugu personally in 2016, when a woman claimed to have been married to him, and again in a similar paternity-adjacent dispute involving another woman, with the firm instructed both times to deny marriage claims while acknowledging paternity.

Having handled matters of Karugu’s most intimate personal affairs while he was alive, the same firm’s partner then presented himself, after Karugu’s death, as executor of a will his own daughter says was fabricated.

It was Kaplan and Stratton’s letterhead on the original 2023 probate petition. It was the firm’s managing partner who turned up in court not for a client, but to defend a colleague facing prosecution for document fraud.

The Attorney-General’s decision to contest the petitioners’ position and back continued investigation and prosecution has been read by some in the legal fraternity as institutionally correct.

But it has also dragged the State Law Office into the middle of a case that exposes exactly the kind of insider dealing, blurred professional boundaries and elite impunity that Oduor’s own chambers are simultaneously being accused of tolerating in their own hiring halls.

An office that cannot certify who is qualified to sit in its own interview panel has little standing to certify who forged a dead man’s signature.

— Editorial assessment, Kenya Insights Investigations Desk

A TENURE DEFINED BY MISCALCULATION

Taken individually, each controversy might be dismissed as noise attending any high-profile legal office. Taken together, a pattern hardens. The Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, 2024 gambit assumed that a sweeping restructuring of constitutional human resource functions could be smuggled through an omnibus bill with minimal scrutiny, that an Advisory Board chaired by the Attorney-General would produce cleaner outcomes than the Public Service Commission, and that the courts would not notice or would not care.

All three assumptions failed.

The result was over two hundred quashed promotions, a second nullified attempt to seize parastatal appointment powers, and now a forensic audit exposing appointees who never applied and counsel who never qualified.

The double dealing is not necessarily personal corruption in the classic sense of money changing hands, though the PSC’s warning about exposure of public funds to misuse leaves that door open pending further investigation.

It is structural double dealing: an office that publicly commits to reform, rule of law and merit while operating internal processes that evade documentation, evade competitive scrutiny, and evade the very oversight body the Constitution designates for the task.

It is an Attorney-General who stood before Parliament promising to fix delays and restore integrity to the justice system, while her own chambers could not produce a pass mark, a ranked list, or a credible explanation for who got hired and why.

Dorcas Oduor’s defenders point to her three decades of prosecutorial service, her role shaping the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act, and the historic weight of being Kenya’s first female Attorney-General.

None of that record answers the specific findings now sitting in a Public Service Commission report bearing the date June 30, 2026. Unqualified State Counsel do not become qualified by institutional pedigree. Ghost applicants do not retroactively apply because the person who hired them has an impressive resume.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The Public Service Commission’s report gives the government and the Judicial Service Commission, on which Oduor herself sits as a constitutional member, a clear mandate: review every irregular appointment flowing from the April to June 2024 recruitment exercise, establish accountability for a process the commission itself says operated outside the constitutional and statutory framework, and ensure future hiring in the State Law Office cannot again produce appointees who do not hold a law degree advising the Republic of Kenya on multibillion-shilling matters.

Whether that accountability reaches beyond the recruitment panel to the office that oversaw it remains the open question hanging over Sheria House. The courts have now ruled against the Attorney-General’s chambers twice on the same underlying pattern of constitutional overreach, found the Health Cabinet Secretary in contempt in a case naming her as co-respondent, and are separately weighing forgery allegations against a law firm whose partner sat opposite her office in a succession dispute this year.

For an Attorney-General whose appointment was framed as a milestone for gender equality and institutional reform, the record accumulating fourteen months in tells a different story: one of miscalculation, evasion and an office that has repeatedly had to be told by the courts what the Constitution already required it to know.