Kisii County Governor James Ongwae has asked county government employees to strive and satisfactorily deliver on their mandate in public service for the benefit of area residents.
Ongwae noted that it was incumbent upon government employees to diligently perform their duties and meet the expectations of the taxpayer masses.
He was speaking during the annual performance contract signing ceremony for County departmental directors at the Kisii Culture Hall where he vowed to have non performing officers discontinued.
The governor observed that in the past, such contracts were not taken seriously and some of his county government staff had taken advantage and were habitually absconding from their call of duty.
‘’As an administration we may have sent the wrong signal that we are lenient and some workers have been taking advantage to abscond from duty. Let me assure you that going forward ,my Deputy Governor and I shall relentlessly crack the whip on non performing officers until the culture of satisfactory service delivery is institutionalised” Ongwae said.
Ongwae said that his government was keen on service delivery and with the help of the Kenya Devolution Support Programme (KDSP), a World Bank initiative, a number of staff has been trained in an on-going scheme with a view to improving service delivery in the county government.
Ongwae, however discounted misconceptions that performance contracting would be a witch-hunt mechanism aimed at penalising government workers saying that it was actually a measure to enhance service delivery in the public service.
He urged county government employees to embrace the performance contract initiative and underscored the programme as a sure way to holding public servants to account in terms of service delivery to wananchi.
On his part, Kisii county Deputy Governor Joash Maangi hailed that performance contracting initiative and asked those tasked with supervisory roles to ensure that all member of staff strived to achieve set performance goals so as to not only give the public value for money, but also to enhance their living standards through proper service delivery.
The directors’ performance contract comes hot on the heels of an earlier one signed between the Chief Officers and County Executive Committee members, a precursor to the main one signed between Governor Ongwae and the CECs recently.
The County boss announced that the performance contracting exercise will be further cascaded to officers in lower cadres by way of a Performance appraisal system he also unveiled during the function.
In the new performance appraisal system, officer from Job Group J to Q will commit on their annual output with their directors through agreed performance indicators to be signed early next year.
