After 19 months of working from home, more than 200 Kemsa employees returned to work on Friday.
This comes just a day after Health CS Susan Wafula urged incoming CEO Andrew Mulwa to guarantee that the personnel were restored to work. She granted the injunction upon the revelation that Kemsa had previously paid the officials millions of shillings.
In line with an executive order from 2021, they were required to work remotely. A similar request was made by former Medical Services Principal Secretary Peter Tum in a letter dated April 14 that asked former Kemsa CEO Terry Ramadhani to recall the employees.
“Please bring back all the cops who are working remotely. Employees of the authority serving under contract should be let go quickly in accordance with the law. This will help with the issue of an overworked workforce, the PS instructed.
According to the letter, the authority hired a caretaker team from the larger public sector to carry out the tasks of the affected personnel.
“Kemsa also recruited officers on short-term contracts to perform duties of the officers working from home,” he continued.
Additionally, Tum claimed in the letter that the remote team had sued Kemsa. He demanded an out-of-court resolution.
“Kemsa should bargain with the present officers in order to reach a potential out-of-court settlement. Complete business re-engineering should be implemented to address some of the authority’s underlying problems, he advised.