By Martin Masai

A deepening garbage crisis has brought Machakos County’s three municipalities—Machakos, Mavoko and Tala–Kangundo—to a near standstill, exposing what insiders describe as a carefully engineered collapse of public service delivery to pave the way for a private takeover.

At the centre of the crisis is a fuel budget that once sustained routine garbage collection across the municipalities but has since been systematically slashed, delayed and effectively neutralised.

When Wavinya Ndeti took office, the county had an annual fuel allocation of about Sh45 million dedicated to garbage collection by municipal trucks and equipment. That budget, according to multiple sources at the County Treasury, was gradually whittled down under the watch of then finance executive Onesmus Kuyu amid claims—never publicly proven—that senior officials in departments overseeing municipalities were siphoning fuel and cash.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1C32BHsu3D/

By the time Kuyu exited office, the fuel vote had shrunk to about Sh12 million, repurposed to run trucks and machinery acquired through a World Bank–supported programme. What followed, however, was not improved efficiency but a steady paralysis.

As allocations shrank, garbage collection deteriorated. Treasury insiders say fuel for waste management became a daily struggle, with unilateral cuts and delayed releases becoming routine. The result has been catastrophic: garbage has gone uncollected for close to a month across all three municipalities, with no clear recovery plan in sight.

Behind the scenes, a more troubling story is unfolding.

Multiple sources at the county treasury allege that Kuyu, working in concert with the Governor’s Procurement office, has been pushing a plan to hand over garbage collection to a Machakos-based businessman described as both a county contractor and a key financier of Ndeti’s election campaign whose name we withold.

The strategy, sources say, has been to starve municipal operations of fuel and authority, manufacture a crisis, then justify emergency outsourcing.

Even after Catherine Mutanu took over the finance docket, the fuel allocations did not return. Treasury officials say the matter has effectively been declared untouchable, leaving municipal managers scrambling to borrow fuel from petrol stations already contracted by the county—despite the county owing those stations large unpaid debts.

The governance vacuum has been worsened by the systematic weakening of municipal boards. Although municipalities are, by law, mandated to deliver core urban services—including solid waste management, water and sanitation, street lighting and environmental control—the boards have been stripped of both authority and budgets.

This week, the Governor inaugurated new municipal boards for Mavoko, Tala-Kangundo and Machakos municipalities.

But even as they took oath, key legal powers remained locked at the county headquarters. Insiders describe the boards as “dummy institutions,” unable to execute their mandates because the county government has refused to transfer funds and operational control as required by law.

That refusal matters. Municipal governments are designed to handle essential public services: garbage collection, road maintenance, drainage, environmental protection, fire and emergency services, urban planning and local economic development.

They are also meant to anchor democratic governance through public participation and accountable local leadership. In Machakos, those functions now exist largely on paper.

At the heart of the standoff is a tender quietly being prepared for private garbage collection. Treasury insiders say the tender is being driven from the top, with terms tailored to benefit the favoured contractor. The plan is not only to pay the contractor but also to hand over publicly acquired trucks and equipment for private use.

Yet even the financial mechanics of the deal are deeply flawed.

Machakos lacks basic infrastructure to measure garbage tonnage. Dumpsites have no weighbridges. As a result, there is no credible way to verify how much waste is collected—raising red flags about the possibility of inflated invoices and unverifiable claims.

A senior accountant assigned to the process reportedly broke ranks in a recent meeting, openly declining to be associated with the tender. According to participants, the official said he would not “go to jail for an issue being pushed top-down,” a rare public rebuke that underscores the legal and ethical risks surrounding the scheme.

What emerges is a pattern: budgetary strangulation, institutional weakening, crisis creation and a pre-arranged private solution.

For residents, the consequences are visible in piles of uncollected waste, blocked drains, public health risks and collapsing confidence in local governance.

For Machakos’ municipalities, the crisis is existential. Starved of fuel, authority and autonomy, they are being reduced to shells—while private interests stand ready to profit from a service failure engineered in plain sight.

Whether oversight institutions intervene or the arrangement proceeds as planned will test not just Machakos County but the integrity of devolved urban governance itself.
What the county government has not explained is equally troubling.
No public participation has been conducted to justify outsourcing garbage collection, despite constitutional and statutory requirements that residents be consulted on major shifts in service delivery.

There has also been no accounting for the service charge levied on all businesses across Machakos, Mavoko and Tala–Kangundo—fees that are expressly intended to fund services such as waste management, sanitation and urban maintenance.
The silence on these funds raises a fundamental question: if the county government is collecting service charges from traders and property owners, why are municipalities unable to collect garbage, fuel trucks or maintain basic cleanliness?

And if the county must now outsource a core urban function, does that amount to an admission that it is unable or unwilling to provide services as required under the Urban Areas and Cities Act?

Attempts to seek answers from the relevant department heads have proved futile. Senior officials, including the governor and County Secretary Dr. Muya Ndambuki, have maintained what insiders describe as a deafening silence, declining to respond to detailed queries on fuel budgets, vote-line changes, the impending tender or the fate of municipal authority.
Yet the questions will not go away.
Residents cannot be expected to live indefinitely amid uncollected garbage, blocked drains and growing health risks while public funds are reallocated without explanation and contracts are quietly prepared behind closed doors.

Whether oversight institutions intervene—or the private takeover proceeds as planned—will test not just Machakos County, but the credibility of devolved urban governance itself.
As we went to press, the municipalities remain paralysed shells, their failures visible on the streets—while answers, accountability and responsibility remain conspicuously absent.

Stay Anchored

http://www.theanchormedia.org