Kakamega North TSC Sub-County Director (SCD) Justus Ndubi has passed on after battling with depression related to transfer away from his ailing wife.
Ndubi, a graduate of Moi University, was plucked from the discipline department at the TSC headquarters and transferred to Lunga Lunga Sub-county in Kwale in 2018, which boarders Tanzania on the coastal strip, and it is one of the remotest sub-counties in the region.
Ndubi, one of the longest serving staffers at the commission headquarters, was then having a sickly wife with a terminal illness. He asked the commission to consider reposting him back to the headquarters or any sub-county within Nairobi in order for him to provide care and support for her.
However, the commission decided to transfer him to Kakamega North Sub-county in the Western region. His wife died last year, upon which Ndubi wrote an emotional message to the TSC CEO Dr Nancy Macharia and the former staffing director Rita Wahome.
“Dear Nancy Macharia and Rita Wahome? You transferred me from Nairobi to Kwale. I appealed to be rerouted to the environs of Nairobi because my wife had chronic kidney failure and I used to take her to Nairobi Hospital twice a week for dialysis and look for blood donors after every two weeks. You didn’t bother to hear my predicament instead you transferred me to Kakamega, a distance of more than 1000km and yet I reside in Nairobi. You denied me transfer allowance, saying I had requested to move near home and yet I don’t have a home in Kisii. Now my wife is in Chiromo mortuary. I should have cared for her a bit but you were so heartless. Don’t issue a circular about her death. Whoever can forward kindly do so,” he wrote.
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The message was widely shared and circulated among his colleagues and workmates on May 25, 2023 on various platforms.
According to his colleagues, the wife died alone in their Nairobi home. This death, according to his workmates, hit him hard and his character changed drastically.
They said he would show up at work late, missed crucial meetings, at times spoke to himself, and kept to himself quite often. He was also said to have isolated himself from his friends and family, raising a huge concern.
He also went into heavy drinking, a behaviour his peers say was quite unusual.
“He was clearly depressed especially after the death of his wife. He no longer had desire to work and severally talked about death,” one of his workmates in Western Kenya told Education News.
His colleagues said he had failed to show up at work on the fateful day. They checked on him at his house, only to find it locked from inside.
It was then that the police were alerted, who broke into the house and found his body lying in a pool of blood. The postmortem conducted later indicated that he died of cardiac arrest.
This incident comes hot on the heels of a similar death of an SCD in Homa Bay County.
David Muruka, who was stationed in Awendo, passed on recently while seated on a chair in his house. The postmortem also indicated a cardiac arrest, with colleagues saying that he was suffering a possible depression.
On a number of occasions, SCDs have complained of work-related stress, frustrations at workplace, and lack of promotion for many years.
A meeting convened by TSC in Naivasha last year highlighted these challenges, but nothing came out of it despite assurance that their matters would be looked into.
By our reporter
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