By Martin Masai
Inside Wavinya’s Revolving Cabinet
For the seventh time since taking office in 2022, Governor Wavinya Ndeti has reshuffled her government—again invoking the now-familiar justification of “optimizing service delivery.”
The wording is unchanged. The pattern is unmistakable. Only the offices and office-holders keep rotating.
What Machakos is experiencing is no longer routine administrative adjustment.
It is governance by rotation, where decisions are made, reversed, and quietly re-adopted without explanation, kind of guesswork deployment. This latest reshuffle lays that bare.
Rita Ndunge’s journey through government reads less like a career path and more like a pendulum. She began in Roads and Transport, was moved to Water, shifted to Agriculture within weeks, and hardly six months later has now landed in Youth and Sports.
These are not adjacent sectors. They require different technical grounding, policy logic, and stakeholder ecosystems. Yet none of the changes made has ever cited matching of skills with tasks assigned as reason for re- assignment.
No serious administration can credibly argue that such movement is driven by performance optimisation because no results have ever been posted for the publicised performance contracts that the ministers and chief officers sign.
Nathaniel Nganga’s case is even more telling. Initially in Roads and Public Works, he was moved to Lands, Energy and Physical Planning. He was later returned to Roads—suggesting a correction. Now, he has been moved again, this time carrying the Roads docket with him back to Lands. The message is muddled: was Roads misplaced before, or is it now? And if the answer keeps changing, what does that say about the decision-making process?
These are not isolated cases. They reflect a broader pattern in which earlier reshuffles are being quietly undone, not through public acknowledgment of error, but through silent reversals.
The reshuffle also involved the movement of entire departments across ministries, signalling an undeclared reorganisation of county government.
Yet there has been no policy paper, no cabinet memo made public, and no assembly debate explaining why functions are being reconfigured midstream.
The disorder is amplified at the Chief Officer level.
Core competencies appear secondary to convenience. Officers trained in planning are redeployed to public service, environmental functions are merged haphazardly with sanitation, and vocational training is assigned without clear sectoral alignment. Acting roles are piled onto existing responsibilities, overstretching capacity while diffusing accountability.
This is the textbook “square peg in a round hole” problem—repeated too often to be accidental.
So where does the trouble lie?
If the issue were poor performance by officials, one would expect dismissals and replacements. Instead, Machakos has witnessed recycling. If the problem were skills gaps, one would expect targeted recruitment or training.
Instead, officers are rotated across unrelated portfolios.
The evidence points away from the servants and toward the command centre.
Frequent reshuffles, especially those that reverse earlier decisions, are a classic symptom of leadership uncertainty.
They suggest a governing style driven by instinct, conflict of interest, moving targets, internal pressure, and political calibration rather than by systems, planning, and measurable outcomes.
Motion has become a substitute for direction.
A confident administration reshuffles sparingly, explains clearly, and moves forward decisively. An uncertain one reshuffles repeatedly—hoping the next configuration will finally deliver what strategy has failed to define.
Seven reshuffles in three years with no clear positive results point to a the verdict is hard to escape: The problem lies with the master not her servants.
Indeed Machakos does not suffer from a staffing crisis. It suffers from a leadership consistency crisis.
Until appointments are anchored in competence, continuity, and transparent evaluation—and until the public is honestly told what is not working—cabinet reshuffles under the Ndeti administration will remain what they have become: noise instead of reform, movement instead of progress.
The Anchor sought a comment from the County Secretary Dr. Muya Ndambuki on more than three occasions and he was yet to respond by the time we went to press.
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