Senate watchdog chair recounts the shocking moment he found Homa Bay governor’s name among 1,327 flagged ghost workers.

In the hallowed halls of the Senate, accountability often comes with a dose of high drama, but few moments have been as bizarre as the one recounted by Homa Bay Senator Moses Kajwang. The Chairperson of the Senate Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has revealed the palpable tension that gripped the room when an audit of Homa Bay County’s payroll threw up a name that shouldn’t have been there: Governor Gladys Wanga.

The revelation came during a probe into the county’s ballooning wage bill, a chronic issue that has crippled development across the devolved units. While the audit was intended to flush out the "ghosts" siphoning millions from public coffers, finding the county boss’s name listed in the anomaly report was a twist no one saw coming. It was, as Kajwang put it, "a moment of profound awkwardness."

The Ghost in the Machine

The context of this discovery is critical. Governor Wanga has been at the forefront of a ruthless purge of ghost workers, recently removing over 1,000 non-existent employees from the payroll to save the county millions. For her own name—or a record linked to her—to be flagged by the very system she championed highlights the deep-seated rot and incompetence in the county’s HR systems.

"We were going line by line, rooting out the rot," Kajwang recalled. "And there it was. It speaks to the absolute chaos inherited in these systems where even the Governor is not immune to clerical absurdity or identity manipulation."

• Systemic Failure: The incident underscores the fragility of the IPPD (Integrated Personnel and Payroll Database) systems used by counties. If a Governor’s profile can be flagged as irregular, the integrity of the entire database is called into question.
• Irony of Reform: Wanga’s administration has been defined by her war on wage bill theft. This "awkward moment" serves as a stark reminder that the corruption networks fight back, often by muddying the waters with such data manipulation.

A Lesson for Devolution

While the moment passed with clarification, it remains a cautionary tale. It exposes how deeply entrenched the "ghost worker" syndicates are, capable of compromising data at the highest level.

For Kajwang, the episode was more than just an anecdote; it was evidence. If the Governor can be a "ghost," then the system is not just broken—it is haunted. The Senate’s directive is now clear: a complete, biometric overhaul of county payrolls is not a luxury, but an emergency.