On 18th May 2026, the Cabinet Secretary for the National Treasury placed a prominent advertisement in Kenya’s national newspapers. It was a clean, professional notice — the kind that signals seriousness and institutional credibility. It invited qualified Kenyans to apply competitively for Independent Director positions on the boards of Government-Owned Entities, KETRACO among them. The deadline was 5:00 PM on 29th May 2026.
Thousands of Kenyans responded. Engineers. Lawyers. Accountants. Energy specialists. People who believed that their country was finally doing things properly.
They were being played.
THE GAZETTE THAT ARRIVED WITH THE DEADLINE
On the very same day that applications closed — 29th May 2026, not a day later, not a week later, the same day — Cabinet Secretary for Energy & Petroleum Opiyo Wandayi published Kenya Gazette Notices No. 8032 and 8033, appointing Mercylinnete Rotich, Janerose Gatwiri, and Nick Ochola to the KETRACO Board of Directors. Effective immediately.
The seats were filled before the application envelopes could be opened.
No shortlisting. No interviews. No merit assessment. No reference to the competitive process that the National Treasury had, until that very morning, been advertising to the public. The names were already known. The decision was already made. The advertisement was theatre — elaborate, expensive, publicly funded theatre designed to simulate transparency while delivering its opposite.
This is not incompetence. Incompetence is random. This was precise.
THE HUMAN COST OF INSTITUTIONAL DECEPTION
Behind the legal and constitutional questions lies a simpler, more human injustice.
A Kenyan professional — perhaps a woman with fifteen years in energy infrastructure, or a young engineer with a master’s degree in electrical systems — read that Treasury advertisement and felt something rare: the sense that their government was giving them a fair chance. They gathered their documents. They wrote their personal statement carefully. They submitted by the deadline.
On the same afternoon, that deadline became a farce.
That professional’s application was never going to be read. The position was never available. The Government had already decided, through a process invisible to the public, who would sit on that Board. The advertisement was not an invitation. It was a prop.
Multiply that professional by the thousands who responded. Then ask what it costs a nation — not in money, but in civic faith — when its government treats the aspirations of its people as stage dressing for predetermined decisions.
WHY KETRACO MAKES THIS WORSE
KETRACO is not a minor entity. The Kenya Electricity Transmission Company is a 100% state-owned company responsible for the planning, construction, and operation of Kenya’s high-voltage electricity transmission infrastructure. Its decisions affect power costs, industrial competitiveness, rural electrification, and the energy security of millions of Kenyan consumers.
Its Board is not ceremonial. It sets strategic direction. It approves major contracts. And it is currently seized of one function of immediate national consequence: the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer.
The individuals gazetted by CS Wandayi — Rotich, Gatwiri, and Ochola — are now positioned to participate in choosing who will run this critical national institution. That CEO will inherit authority flowing from a Board whose own composition bypassed every constitutional safeguard designed to ensure competence, independence, and merit.
The chain of infirmity does not stop at the Board. It descends into the executive leadership of an institution that millions of Kenyans depend on.
THE CONSTITUTION THAT IS BEING QUIETLY SET ASIDE
Kenya’s Constitution is unambiguous on this question. Article 232 does not suggest that public appointments should be merit-based — it mandates it. It prescribes fair competition. It prescribes transparency. It prescribes accountability. These are not aspirational clauses inserted for decoration. They are enforceable obligations binding on every State organ and every State officer.
Article 10 binds Cabinet Secretaries to national values including transparency and good governance every time they exercise public power. Article 27 guarantees every Kenyan equal protection of the law and equal opportunity — a guarantee that is hollow if some citizens compete openly while others are appointed through invisible processes.
Article 47 guarantees fair administrative action. The thousands of Kenyans whose applications were received by a government that had already made its decision received no notice, no hearing, and no explanation. They were not even afforded the dignity of being told the truth.
None of these provisions carries a suspension clause. None says “except in the case of KETRACO.” None empowers a Cabinet Secretary to advertise publicly while appointing privately.
TWO ARMS OF GOVERNMENT, PULLING IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS
What makes this episode particularly alarming is the institutional contradiction it exposes.
The National Treasury — the ministry responsible for GOE governance — advertised a transparent competitive process. The Ministry of Energy — the ministry responsible for the energy sector — simultaneously processed and published appointments to the same positions through a completely separate, non-public channel.
Either the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing — which is a governance catastrophe — or both hands knew exactly what they were doing, which is something worse.
In either case, the result is the same: a public process that meant nothing, appointments that were decided elsewhere, and a government that spoke the language of transparency while practising its opposite.
George Orwell described this architecture precisely. All animals are equal. The pigs just handle the gazette notices.
WHAT THIS SIGNALS TO EVERY KENYAN WHO APPLIES FOR ANYTHING
The damage of this episode extends beyond KETRACO. It sends a message — loudly, through official gazette notices — to every Kenyan professional who has ever applied for a public position on merit.
The message is this: the advertisement is not a genuine invitation. The process is not genuine competition. Somewhere, in a room you are not in, names are already being written. Your credentials are not the currency that matters.
That message, once received and believed, corrodes something fundamental. It tells citizens that engagement with public institutions is irrational — that the correct response to an advertised government position is not to apply but to find out who is already chosen. It converts civic participation into farce. And it drives the most capable, most principled Kenyans — those least willing to operate through back channels — permanently out of public service.
A country that cannot staff its institutions on merit cannot build anything durable on top of them.
THE RULE OF LAW IS NOT A SLOGAN
Kenya spent years, blood, and enormous national energy producing a Constitution that was supposed to end exactly this kind of governance. The 2010 Constitution was not a cosmetic exercise. It was a social contract — a promise by the State to its citizens that power would be exercised transparently, accountably, and in accordance with law.
When Cabinet Secretaries run parallel appointment processes — one public, one private — they are not merely bending a rule. They are repudiating that contract. They are telling Kenyans that the Constitution is a document to be quoted in speeches and circumvented in practice.
COFEK’s position is straightforward: the rule of law is not suspended because a gazette notice is convenient. Articles 10, 27, 47, and 232 of the Constitution do not take annual leave. And the Kenyans who were deceived by a sham recruitment process deserve better than a government that treats their constitutional rights as an inconvenience to be managed.
The KETRACO Board, as currently constituted following Gazette Notices 8032 and 8033, should not be exercising any functions — least of all the appointment of a Chief Executive Officer — until the lawfulness of its composition is properly determined.
Accountability is not optional. Neither is the Constitution.
