NCIC: Don’t be quick to accuse public employers of ethnic favouritism

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

09 October 2016

In 1999, Egerton University took over Kisii Teachers’ College and converted it into Kisii College Campus. As a result, a number of new senior positions were created in the new campus and these were advertised openly at Egerton.

The outcome was that nearly all the applicants for the new posts were people hailing from regions neighbouring the new campus. Consequently, the majority of the senior jobs went to Kisiis. Because of this, the university administration was accused fanning tribalism.

In an attempt to correct the apparent anomaly, some of the positions were re-advertised but that did not change the ethnic profile of applicants. Luckily, by the conclusion of the second round, the tribalism accusations had died away.

To this day, public universities are still accused of filling their workforce with people from the predominant ethnic group of their locality. Institutions located in the rural areas are the main targets of these accusations. Such charges are hardly ever levelled against the University of Nairobi, for example.

This phenomenon is no just peculiar to Kenya; it is universal. It cuts across all nations and disciplines; so much so that it even has a technical name: statisticians call it the “Base Rate Fallacy”.

 Here is a simpler illustration: Consider an institution with 100 vacancies. It then employs 80 men and 20 women. At first sight, there appears to be a gender biased in favour of men (80 per cent of the recruits). But suppose that 500 men and 50 women had applied for these positions: does that change things?

It now turns out that only 16 per cent of the male applicants got the jobs while 40 per cent of the females were employed. Therefore, the institution actually favoured the women, not the men!

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) falls into this trap many times. The “Ethnic and Diversity Audit” reports released early this week is the most recent instance. Using employment data, the NCIC concluded that the majority of counties and public institutions are giving unfair preference to the dominant ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, these reports do not have the ethnic profiles of the applicants for the jobs in the public sector. To make matters worse, candidates are never asked to state their tribes or ethnicity when applying for jobs; so getting that information can be tricky. But without those numbers, we cannot make a valid or reliable conclusion about ethnic favouritism.

I suspect that the County Governments and other public institutions are facing the same challenge that Egerton University faced two decades ago: people from minority groups are simply not applying for jobs in large enough numbers – after all, they are called “minority” because they are few in the population!

The fact that a particular ethnic group dominates the staff of a public institution is not enough proof of favouritism. To make that conclusion, is alarmist and inflames ethnic hatred. So we now have a peculiar problem where the very institution that is supposed to check on ethnic tension (NCIC) is guilty of that crime!