The Ministry of Public Service has announced plans to implement a new policy aimed at revising the promotion process within government departments.

During a discussion on the SemaNaSPox podcast on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Principal Secretary for Public Service and Human Capital Development, Jane Imbunya, explained that these adjustments will be introduced as part of the forthcoming Public Service Transformation policy.

“We are penning a policy known as the public service reforms policy, and this is a gift for the youth of Kenya. You do not have to work for 50 years for you to become a director,” Imbunya said.

“It will no longer be a matter of what you come and do, because it will be based on merit. You will become a director at 25; you don’t have to wait until you are 50 for you to be promoted.”

Once the policy is approved, the PS said that promotions in all government departments will be purely based on merit and not by age and experience, as they are right now.

Ibunya is optimistic that the move will be fundamental in empowering youth and unlocking the untapped economic potential they hold through public service.

The announcement comes just two days after she directed all civil servants nearing retirement to get in touch with their respective payroll officers to ensure that they benefit from timely pensions after hanging up their boots.

The PS said that the ministry will send reminder letters to these civil servants to ensure that they register themselves for retirement through the officers.

The workers will be issued a special code that will enable them to be included in the government’s Pension Tracking Module, which went live last year, according to the PS.

“It doesn’t matter where you work; you have to ensure you register yourself if you are nearing retirement so that you may get a code that will enable us to enter you into the systems so that we may ensure our retirees are comfortable once they go home,” the PS said during an interview on a local Radio station on Monday, February 9, 2026.

According to the PS, once the civil servants have registered themselves, they will get a special code that will enable them to be included in the government’s Pension Tracking Module, which has been active since 2025.

A pension tracking module is a digital tool designed to monitor, consolidate, and display an individual’s pension entitlements from various sources in one place.

The PS has said that the system has been fundamental in eliminating delays and improving efficiency in pension payments across different government departments.

Payroll clearance

At the same time, the PS revealed that the government is in the process of cleaning up the payroll system to remove the names and data of some Kenyans who no longer work for the government but are still getting paid.

She said the government will remove the names of retired and deceased government workers from the civil service register as they were inadvertently left in the payroll system during the transition from manual to digital records.

“There have been some major reforms in the country’s payroll system, and it will continue. We are now in a new digital payroll system, which is currently cleaning up the salary system, because it has heavy data since the government is the largest employer,” Imbunya said.

“What we are currently doing is gathering information on every worker so that we may ensure that every Kenyan receives one salary. Since we were in the manual system, you find that there was some information that was supposed to be removed, but it has not yet been removed, and those include those who retired and those who died.”

The system is also poised to weed out ghost workers across different government departments.