ADVERT 
ADVERTTwo weeks ago, a quiet procession passed through the streets of Siaya.
There were no politicians at its head. No powerful professional body was behind it. No convoy of expensive vehicles accompanied it. No television cameras chased the demonstrators. No national political figure stopped to listen.
It was simply a group of tired-looking men and women—market sweepers, cleaners and garbage collectors—walking through Siaya town asking for what, by any reasonable standard of justice, should never have become a matter of protest: their wages.
Their complaint was that they had gone for as long as eight months without being paid.
Eight months.
ADVERTThat is not an administrative inconvenience. It is not a minor payroll glitch. It is not a technical footnote in the transition from one government financial system to another.
For a low-income worker, eight months without wages can mean eight months of unpaid rent, mounting school fees, accumulated debts, food insecurity and dependence on relatives and neighbours. It can mean walking to work because there is no money for transport, while knowing that the very government employing you has not paid you.
And perhaps the most troubling part of this story is not merely that the workers have allegedly gone unpaid for so long.
It is how little their plight appears to matter.
Had the procession been made up of doctors, lawyers, teachers, university lecturers, business executives or another professionally organised and politically consequential constituency, the demands would probably have dominated public conversation.
But these are sweepers and garbage collectors.
They occupy the bottom rung of the visibility ladder.
Yet their work is among the most visible services a county government provides.
Every morning, they are expected to make markets usable, remove waste, clean public spaces and protect communities from the consequences of poor sanitation. When they do their work well, most people barely notice them.
When they stop doing it, everybody notices.
There is therefore something profoundly wrong when the people responsible for keeping Siaya clean must themselves take to the streets because their employer has failed to keep its side of the bargain.
This cannot simply be dismissed as another casualty of the county’s payroll reforms.
The County Government of Siaya has been candid about having a serious payroll problem.
In June, the county itself announced an urgent payroll-resolution exercise after hundreds of employees reportedly continued working without pay. The administration said approximately 900 newly employed workers lacked Unified Payroll Numbers, while 1,322 short-term contract workers also required payroll regularisation. A national government technical team was subsequently sent to Siaya to accelerate UPN generation and Human Resource Information System integration.
That is important context.
It means the current crisis did not suddenly appear yesterday.
It has been developing for months.
The County Assembly had already raised concerns in May after reports that more than 500 workers, including market sweepers and hospital cleaners, had gone without salaries for two months because they lacked personnel numbers. The issue was linked to the move away from manual payroll arrangements towards formal payroll systems.
And yet here we are.
Workers are still talking about months of unpaid wages.
At some point, “IFMIS”, “UPN”, “IHRIS”, “payroll verification” and “system integration” cease to be explanations and become bureaucratic vocabulary for a very simple human question:
Where is my money?
Technology is supposed to make government work better.
A payroll system is supposed to ensure that a person who has worked receives the wages due to him or her.
If the system instead becomes the reason a person who has worked for months cannot be paid, then the system has become an obstacle rather than a solution.
There is certainly a legitimate need for Siaya to clean up its payroll.
Indeed, an earlier county systems audit found longstanding weaknesses in the management of the county payroll, including the coexistence of formal and manual payroll arrangements and concerns about the integrity of manually maintained payroll data.
That history makes payroll reform necessary.
But payroll reform cannot be allowed to become an excuse for indefinite non-payment.
There is another uncomfortable issue.
The county cannot simultaneously tell workers that their payroll status is being regularised and expect them to continue providing essential services indefinitely without knowing when they will be paid.
If there are genuine questions about whether particular workers were lawfully engaged, those questions should be resolved through transparent verification. If they were properly contracted and have actually performed the work, the county should explain clearly when and through what mechanism their arrears will be settled.
If there are workers who should not have been engaged in the first place, then the public deserves to know who authorised those engagements and why.
That is where accountability begins.
The law is not silent on the value of labour.
Article 41 of the Constitution guarantees every person the right to fair labour practices and expressly gives every worker the right to fair remuneration.
The Employment Act similarly provides rules governing when wages and salaries become due, including provisions covering casual and monthly-paid employees. Kenyan courts have repeatedly treated payment of wages as a fundamental component of the employment relationship.
This is therefore not merely a question of political goodwill.
It is a question of labour rights, contractual obligations, administrative responsibility and public-sector management.
There is, of course, a wider financial problem confronting counties.
Siaya has acknowledged that its July and August 2026 salaries were delayed because of the prolonged completion of the 2026/27 budget process. The Controller of Budget has separately identified Siaya among counties whose budget processes had not been cleared, limiting their ability to make lawful withdrawals and disrupting salaries and services.
That explains part of the broader salary crisis.
It does not automatically explain every unpaid wage claim.
Nor should an eight-month claim by a particular cadre of workers simply be folded into the general July–August salary controversy.
If these sweepers and garbage collectors are indeed owed eight months, then the county should publish the facts: how many workers are affected, what contracts they hold, the total amount outstanding, which months remain unpaid, why the arrears accumulated, whether funds were budgeted for them and precisely when payment will be made.
That would be far more reassuring than another promise that workers will eventually be “onboarded”.
Because workers cannot eat onboarding.
They cannot pay school fees with an IFMIS reference number.
They cannot settle rent with a UPN.
They cannot feed their families with an assurance that the payroll architecture is being streamlined.
They need money.
And they need it for work already performed.
There is also something morally unsettling about the apparent asymmetry of attention within public administration.
Government is full of meetings, ceremonies, launches, political engagements, strategic plans, reforms and grand announcements.
But beneath all that machinery are people whose livelihoods depend upon the ordinary functioning of government.
The sweeper does not need a grand speech.
The garbage collector does not need a political slogan.
The market cleaner does not need to be told that the county is undertaking “transformative reforms”.
They need their wages.
And if the county cannot pay them immediately, it owes them something almost as important: an honest, written and verifiable explanation.
The County Government of Siaya has recently spoken publicly about strengthening financial management. Its new Finance leadership has promised fiscal reforms, greater transparency and more prudent management of public resources.
This is precisely where such reforms should begin.
Not with another seminar.
Not with another committee.
Not with another acronym.
Start with the person who sweeps the market before most of Siaya wakes up.
Start with the woman who handles rubbish that everybody else would rather not touch.
Start with the worker who performs one of the least glamorous but most necessary functions in public service.
Pay them.
If there is a legitimate obstacle, tell them exactly what it is.
If their documentation is incomplete, help them complete it.
If their contracts require verification, verify them.
If there is a dispute over whether they are employees, resolve it lawfully.
If they are owed money, calculate it, disclose it and pay it.
And if anyone authorised an employment arrangement that cannot legally be paid, let the appropriate institutions establish responsibility.
That is what institutional reform looks like.
The County Governments Act requires counties to deliver services while observing principles including equity, efficiency, transparency and accountability. It also places human-resource management and effective functioning of the county public service at the centre of county administration.
Clean streets are a service.
Garbage collection is a service.
Market sanitation is a service.
And the people delivering those services are human beings before they are entries on a payroll spreadsheet.
There is a temptation in public administration to measure importance according to the size of a person’s salary, the title on their office door or the political influence of their constituency.
That is the wrong measure.
The real test of government is often found at the bottom—not at the top.
A government that can organise a major political rally but cannot reliably pay the person cleaning the market has a governance question to answer.
A government that can announce sophisticated payroll reforms but cannot tell a worker when his arrears will be settled has a management question to answer.
And a society that watches poorly paid workers march silently for eight months’ wages without paying much attention has a moral question to answer.
The sweepers and garbage collectors of Siaya may not have powerful voices.
But they have done something important.
They have reminded the county that behind every payroll number is a human life.
The question now is no longer whether they have been patient.
They have.
The question is no longer whether they understand the county’s financial difficulties.
They probably do.
The question is no longer whether payroll reforms are necessary.
They plainly are.
The question is much simpler:
When will the people who have cleaned Siaya’s streets finally receive the money they have earned?
For the County Government of Siaya, the most dignified answer would not be another promise.
It would be a payment date—and then the payment itself.
