Senator Godfrey Osotsi exposes rot in county health facilities
The push to establish National Teaching and Referral Hospitals across all regions took a dramatic turn in the Senate after Vihiga Senator Godfrey Osotsi backed the proposal but delivered a hard-hitting critique of health systems in the counties.
Speaking during the debate on the motion introduced by Taita Taveta Senator Mwaruma on Wednesday, November 19, 2025, Osotsi said he supports the creation of regional referral hospitals in Coast, Eastern, Northeastern, Nyanza and Western Kenya — but warned that the country risks building new facilities on top of a broken foundation.
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Osotsi, who chairs the County Public Investments and Special Funds Committee, revealed that recent audits of Level 4 and 5 hospitals expose “horrible” levels of mismanagement, ranging from staff chaos to lost drugs and expired medicines.
He said county hospitals are drowning in human resource scandals, including bloated staff, unaccounted-for casual workers, poor promotion structures and failures in succession planning, problems he described as “common across all counties”.
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The senator painted a bleak picture of corruption in drug management, noting that some health workers deliberately deny patients essential medicines and instead direct them to buy drugs in mushrooming chemists around county hospitals.
“These chemists thrive because patients are pushed out of hospitals and into pharmacies connected to insiders,” he said, adding that the trend is so widespread that it has become a defining feature of county healthcare.
Osotsi recalled previous concerns raised in Mombasa, where the county vowed to stop licensing new chemists near hospitals after reports of drug losses and large quantities of expired medicine.
He further warned that many county hospitals remain non-compliant with basic health standards, a failure he said is “directly linked to mismanagement and corruption”.
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While supporting the motion, Osotsi insisted that county governments must allocate more funds to their health dockets and overhaul governance in Level 5 and 6 facilities to reduce pressure on national referral hospitals.
He urged the Senate to treat the motion not just as a step toward expanding infrastructure, but as a wake-up call to confront the systemic failures weakening Kenya’s public healthcare system.
