James Kipsiele Tembur appointed new NYS director-general

President William Ruto has appointed James Kipsiele Tembur the director-general of the National Youth Service.

Mr Tembur was among the five candidates shortlisted for interviews on December 4, 2023. The other candidates shortlisted for the position were Njiri Nelson Mugweru, Anjere Alfred Tom, Nakitari Humphrey Okuku and Mbaruku Moses Mjeru.

The new NYS boss will hold the position “for a period of three years with effect from December 20, 2023”.

Mr Tembur, who has been acting since April, takes over from Matilda Sakwa, whose tenure ended and has since joined to the Pyrethrum Processing Company of Kenya as CEO.

Ms Sakwa had been the director general of NYS since 2019, having held the position in an acting capacity for over a year.

The appointment of Mr Tembur comes just weeks after President William Ruto early this month rolled out a new plan for the paramilitary agency.

He announced the setting aside of 80 per cent of military and police slots to NYS graduates, as well as a condition that all Kenyans to be sent to other countries for work must go through a pre-deployment training at the service.

This, coupled with a plan to recruit at least 100,000 youth every year, will balloon the mandate and size of the NYS, the paramilitary training unit run by the State.

Setting aside 80 per cent of all military, police, forest rangers and other security services’ slots to NYS graduates was a decision of the powerful National Security Council (NSC), which the President chairs, Dr Ruto said.

“We have also agreed that NYS and we are already concluding negotiations with Germany, Saudi Arabia and ex other eight countries on the export of labour and the NYS will be the central organization for pre-deployment training so that Kenyans will understand what they need to do as labour exported from Kenya,” he stated.

President Ruto said the administration would step up the intake of the NYS trainees from the current 10,000 to 15,000 per cohort beginning next year.

This, he said was aimed at achieving 100,000 annual enrolment for the next five years.

“This year, we are graduating 10,000, in next year in the first cohort, it will be 15,000 and in the next cohort it will be 15,000. So next year alone, 30,000 young people from across Kenya will graduate in NYS as we position NYS as the incubator for all other arms of government,” he said.

“We have embarked on a strategic re-engineering of the NYS to enhance the capacity of the institution to take up greater numbers of trainees, and position it on the path of financial sustainability through revenue generation, thereby creating the conditions to support the expansion of enrolment to 100,000 young people annually in the next five years.”

The president similarly noted that the government was mobilizing resources to increase the capacity of NYS training institutions, and the skilled training staff and had already approved the 40 per cent salary increment which would take effect beginning June 2023.

“Beginning the next financial year, their salary will be increased by 40 %. I have also approved the modernization and re-engineering of NYS so that in February, we will have an additional 200 cadets who will be trained to enhance the capacity of NYS to train more service men and women as we use NYS to grow the pool of young people that are job ready to take up responsibilities in different sectors,” he said.