The Kitui County Governor Julius Malombe faces dangerous conflict with the Senate because a comprehensive audit uncovered expired medical products and governance deficiencies and unlawful employment methods, which applied to multiple county hospitals.
The legislative body raised strong objections after the audit findings, which revealed hospital operation problems at public health facilities that required investigation.
The senators were surprised to learn that hospitals in Kitui, which included Kitui Referral and Mwingi Level 4 and Tseikuru and Mutomo and Ikanga facilities, all maintained stockpiles of expired medications, which included items that had reached their expiration date since 2020.
The discovery has raised questions about how safe patients will be and how well they will be treated in health facilities that operate under devolved authority because it shows potential negligence that exists in the county’s medical supply chain.
“Senators who attended the hearing received information that expired drugs that remain on shelves will lead to two negative consequences, which include decreased trust in our health system and increased risk to patient safety.” The senator demanded that Malombe take emergency measures to deal with this problem.
Governor Malombe could not give exact values for the expired inventory because he said that most of it originated from short shelf-life Covid-19 donations, and he said that the county would eliminate the inventory after they installed the new incinerator. The committee members rejected his response because they determined it did not meet the requirements set by the clear audit proof.
The senators raised additional conflict issues when they reported that Tseikuru Sub-County Hospital lacked proper hospital management boards, which needed legal recognition.
Malombe offered a defense by stating that officials established a new board through official publication during mid-2025, which officials claimed violated legal requirements.
Lawmakers contested drug quality issues because they uncovered unapproved casual employee hiring methods that broke the established human resource hiring procedures. Senator Godfrey Osotsi, who served as committee chair, described the system pattern that he observed as “systemic failure” while he required precise data to determine employment status between actual workers and “ghost” employees.
Parliamentary members better understand their concerns about county health management, which needs proper oversight throughout the Governor Malombe case because the Senate strongly rebuked him. Lawmakers indicated that they would investigate further into the matter while imposing potential penalties if the authorized corrective measures did not arrive at their scheduled time.
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