It is a peculiarly Kenyan paradox: you can live in a newly gazetted sub-county, yet the government presence there is as invisible as the ink on the gazette notice. Across the country, millions of citizens are waking up in what officials are now calling administrative “dead zones”—areas that legally exist but functionally do not.

The promise was simple: bring government closer to the people. But a deepening budget crisis has turned that promise into a logistical nightmare. A new report handed to President William Ruto reveals that despite the gazettement of thousands of new administrative units, the National Treasury has failed to release the funds needed to staff, build, or equip them. The result is a map of Kenya dotted with "ghost" offices where no services are rendered.

The Anatomy of a ‘Dead Zone’

The scale of the paralysis is staggering. Data from the Ministry of Interior indicates that while the government intended to operationalize 1,105 administrative units in the 2024/2025 financial year, the reality on the ground is starkly different. Currently, the backlog of non-operational units includes:

• 45 Sub-counties that lack Deputy County Commissioners or headquarters.
• 291 Divisions existing only in name.
• 1,439 Locations and 2,693 Sub-locations without chiefs or assistants.

For the average Kenyan, this is not just bureaucratic trivia. It means traveling 50 kilometers to the "old" headquarters to apply for an ID card or report a crime, because the "new" office in your village is an empty plot of land. In volatile regions like Isiolo and the North Rift, where new units were gazetted specifically to boost security, these vacuums are dangerous. Without a local administrator, the chain of command breaks, leaving communities vulnerable to banditry and conflict.

The Blame Game: Treasury vs. Counties

The root of the rot lies in a vicious cycle of cash crunches. The Council of Governors (CoG) has raised the alarm, threatening a total shutdown of county services due to delayed disbursements from the National Treasury. As of late 2025, counties are grappling with arrears amounting to over KSh 63.6 billion. Without these funds, devolved units cannot support the infrastructure—offices, vehicles, and housing—required to host national government administrators.

Controller of Budget Margaret Nyakang’o has been vocal about the systemic failures, noting that budget approvals in over a dozen counties have stalled due to political infighting and poor coordination. "They are already breaking the law," Nyakang’o warned regarding the delays, emphasizing that without approved budgets, counties cannot legally draw funds to build the very offices these new administrators are meant to occupy.

A Crisis of Expectations

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen has acknowledged the gap, attributing the stall to "budgetary gaps" inherited from previous fiscal years. While the Ministry has secured a supplementary budget to begin hiring for some of these positions, the rollout is being conducted on a "first-in, first-out" basis. This bureaucratic triage means that a sub-county gazetted in 2017 might only see its first officer in 2026.

The disconnect creates a crisis of expectations. Politicians lobby for new units to please their bases, promising jobs and closer services. When those units fail to materialize, trust in government erodes. As one analyst noted, "We are drawing lines on a map and calling it development, but you cannot govern a territory with a gazette notice alone."

Until the Treasury aligns its disbursements with the government's expansionist ambitions, these administrative units will remain what they are today: paper tigers in a digital age, offering neither service nor security to the Kenyans who need them most.