Samburu Governor Lati Lelelit Exposed For Paying Sh60 Million To Ghost Workers

In a devastating audit that has stripped away every pretence of competent administration, Samburu Governor Jonathan Lati Lelelit stands exposed for presiding over the payment of approximately sixty million shillings to twenty-nine irregularly recruited staff in a phantom Governor’s Delivery Unit while another eighty-three employees collected salaries for a full year despite having no recorded job titles, no defined roles and no verifiable responsibilities.

The Auditor-General’s report for the financial year ending June 30 2025 has laid bare a governor who has turned the county payroll into a private slush fund, bypassing every legal safeguard and treating public resources as personal patronage to be dispensed at will.

Between July 2024 and June 2025 these eighty-three workers drew millions from Samburu’s strained coffers with almost no trace of their employment records remaining intact.

Critical biodata including national identity numbers, NSSF details, dates of birth, appointment documents, KRA PINs and bank accounts were missing from official files.

In one particularly brazen case two different individuals appeared on the payroll under the same national identity card number yet under separate payroll entries, an anomaly the county has never explained.

Recruitment processes across the administration were conducted in open defiance of the law.

There were no public advertisements, no interviews, no shortlisting and in many instances no personal files at all.

The County Public Service Board operated without any annual recruitment plan despite hiring seven hundred and forty-eight new staff during the period, and no evidence has been produced to show that budgetary allocations were secured before these appointments were made.

The Governor’s Delivery Unit represents the most egregious example of this parallel system of extraction. Twenty-nine individuals were brought onto the payroll without any approval from the County Public Service Board at a time when that board had no sitting members because previous terms had already expired.

The unit itself did not exist in the county’s approved organisational structure and the duties of its members were never defined or documented.

Yet by the time auditors examined the books taxpayers had already been forced to fund approximately sixty million shillings in salaries for this undefined structure, with twenty-seven point six million of that amount paid out between July and November 2024 alone. This was not an administrative error. It was the deliberate construction of a patronage vehicle outside the requirements of the County Governments Act.

The same administration that found money for ghost-like workers and undefined delivery units found other creative ways to extract value from public funds. Two point seven million shillings in PAYE tax was illegally deducted from nineteen employees living with disabilities who were legally entitled to full exemptions under the Persons with Disabilities Act.

At the same time fifty-nine point four million shillings in salaries were processed outside the mandatory Integrated Payroll and Personnel Database system in direct violation of National Treasury regulations.

These practices were not new.

In the previous financial year the same administration operated twenty-five illegal bank accounts holding one hundred and forty-two point four million shillings whose purpose, approvals and signatories remain unexplained.

More than five hundred and sixty-six million shillings could not be accounted for at all.

Three hundred and nineteen point six five million shillings in salaries went to three hundred and fifty officers through channels outside the official payroll system, while thirty-six point four million shillings were paid to casual workers without proper muster rolls or oversight.

Governor Lelelit has responded to every attempt at accountability with evasion and political theatre rather than transparency.

The Senate County Public Accounts Committee issued repeated summonses requiring him to explain these and earlier audit queries. He ignored them. The committee imposed fines, including five hundred thousand shillings for non-appearance, and formally requested the Inspector General of Police to arrest and produce him before it.

Arrest warrants were issued on multiple occasions. Still the governor failed to appear, once citing a United Democratic Alliance meeting at State House as a higher priority than accounting for public money before Parliament.

On April 1 2026 the confrontation spilled into public view when senators cornered him outside Parliament buildings as he addressed the media, triggering a heated exchange that left the Council of Governors condemning what it described as an assault on the governor while Lelelit portrayed himself as the victim of political persecution.

Even the county’s water and sanitation company has not escaped the pattern of opacity. SAWASCO received a disclaimer of opinion from the Auditor-General after officials denied auditors access to critical financial records and supporting documentation.

Across multiple institutions under Governor Lelelit’s control the same signature of governance appears: missing documentation, bypassed legal processes, parallel structures that serve no public purpose except to move money, and a stubborn refusal to face elected oversight.

Samburu remains one of Kenya’s most marginalised counties, its people enduring arid conditions, livestock insecurity and limited access to basic services while public resources have been diverted into ghost payrolls, undefined delivery units and opaque bank accounts controlled by the governor’s administration.

The people of Samburu are entitled to know exactly who received the sixty million shillings channelled through the Delivery Unit and what, if anything, those individuals delivered in return.

They are entitled to know the identities and actual duties of the eighty-three employees who drew salaries without roles. They are entitled to know why disabled workers were illegally taxed and why hundreds of millions of shillings remain unaccounted for across successive audit cycles.

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission has already been directed by senators to declare the Delivery Unit redundant and to surcharge those who benefited from it. That process must now move without delay.

The Director of Public Prosecutions must examine whether criminal liability attaches to the systematic bypassing of recruitment laws and payroll controls. Parliament must enforce its own authority without fear or favour.

Governor Jonathan Lati Lelelit has enjoyed every protection and every benefit that public office confers. The evidence now on record leaves him with no credible defence and no place left to hide from the consequences of his administration’s actions.