The Public Service Commission (PSC) has stepped into a path once walked by the Judiciary in an attempt to set 70 as the retirement age for academics, triggering a war with the Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU).
For judges, the battle was on whether those hired before promulgation of the 2010 Constitution should retire at 74 as per the terms at the time of their appointment.
Then Deputy Chief Justice Kalpana Rawal, her colleagues Philip Tunoi (Supreme Court) and David Onyancha (High Court) sued seeking to have only judges hired after 2010 retire at 70, as prescribed by the constitutional changes.
This time, lecturers are leaning on a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) they signed in 2024 with the Inter-Public Universities Councils Consultative Forum (IPUCCF) which allowed them to exit at 74.
The PSC on March 2 poured cold water on that CBA, with a circular to vice-chancellors directing them to ensure that professors, associate professors/researchers and lecturers retire at 70.
The university staff, through the Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU), protested PSC’s action to lower retirement age for lecturers and researchers from 74 to 70, securing temporary court orders to stop the State from acting.
“With effect from the date of this circular letter, the mandatory retirement age for lecturers and research scientists serving in public universities, research institutions or equivalent institutions…shall be 70 for professor/research professor; associate professor/associate research professor (and 75 for persons with disabilities- PWDs),” PSC Chief Executive Paul Famba said.
The dispute has, however, reignited contentions around the debate on when public officials should retire, which have played out for decades.
Last year, the High Court declined to extend workers’ retirement age beyond 60, following a petition arguing that it was discriminatory to have a category of public officers retiring past 70 as others are compelled to exit work at 60.
The mandatory retirement age in Kenya changed for the first time in 2009 when it moved from 55 to 60, as concerns grew over pension liabilities.
As normal workers’ exit age went up five years, the new constitution in 2010 dealt a blow to judges as it lowered their retirement age from 74.
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“A judge shall retire from office on attaining the age of 70 years, but may elect to retire at any time after attaining the age of 65 years,” the Constitution stated.
Justices Tunoi, Rawal and Onyancha argued that they should be allowed to stick to the contracts they signed under the old Constitution and instead leave at 74. All three had turned 70 at the time.
Midway through the case, Justice Onyancha gave in and retired, leaving the two Supreme Court judges, backed and opposed by several judicial officers in equal measure, in the battle.
The Supreme Court, sitting without the two plaintiffs, eventually ruled in 2016 that the age of 70 stated in the 2010 Constitution be upheld and respected, effectively kicking Justices Tunoi and Rawal out of office.
University of Nairobi (UoN) Economics Professor Samuel Nyandemo says that while some professions need to retain a portion of expert staff with rare knowledge and skills needing to be transferred to younger workers, institutions must strike a balance with the entry of new workers to the job market.
“In some professions, a staff who gets to the age of 70 and not senile yet still has more to offer and dispatch knowledge. Conversely, in an economy that is not generating many new jobs, exiting helps create space for younger workers,” he says.
Over the years, audits have also flagged cases of thousands of public service employees remaining at work and drawing salaries after hitting the retirement age, raising concerns over blocking on new entrants to the job market.
In the 2023/2024 fiscal year, for instance, the latest period with available reports for county governments, the Auditor-General flagged 406 workers who continued to work after hitting the retirement age in 11 counties.
The Human Resource Policies and Procedures Manual for the Public Service, 2016 requires all officers to retire on attaining 60 years, and 65 years for persons with disabilities (PWDs).
“Age Analysis of monthly IPPD payroll supporting the expenditure revealed that 27 employees who attained the mandatory retirement age of 60 years were still active in payroll and were paid total gross salary amounting to Sh11, 121, 125,” the public auditor said on Nandi County.
Auditors have, however, exposed public institutions for retaining workers who have already hit mandatory retirement age under the guise of possessing “rare knowledge, skills and competencies that are scarce, unique and not readily available in the job market” but without proving.
For many years, public servants have tried all the tricks in the book to serve longer and postpone going back home, from getting new identity cards with a younger age, forging documents to feign disability and even creating transitional crisis to be retained for a bit longer.
In an exit report in January, former PSC Chairman Anthony Muchiri observed that under his tenure, the commission introduced a mandatory re-assessment for one to be recognised as a PWD.
“To address the rampant abuse and falsification of disability status by public officers seeking to unlawfully extend their service to 65 years, the Chairperson introduced a mandatory re-assessment requirement,” the exit report stated.
“This measure was designed to authenticate Reports issued by unscrupulous practitioners and to curb the use of illegally obtained disability certificates,” it added.
Mr Mwaura also noted that there has been a huge appetite among youths for positions advertised in government where applications are coming ten-fold the advertised position, reflecting the pressure at the entry to the job market.
It is easy to understand why some workers are hesitant to go back home even after serving for decades, if data being churned out from the Retirement Benefits Authority (RBA) is anything to go by.
The RBA’s pensioner survey in 2024 revealed that despite having retired, many pensioners were still catering for their families through provision of food, payment of school fees and other household needs, having to take care of youths aged even above 25.
The survey also showed than more than half of the retirees were earning pensions of less than Sh20,000, though during their working years the pay was high.
Since July 2020, the government has spent Sh830 billion paying pensions, a budget that has always proved to be a crucial pressure point as more pensioners experienced delays caused by cash constraints at Treasury.
Contentions on when public officials should retire have played out for decades.
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Since 2021, the government, however, transitioned from a defined benefit pension system where Treasury funded pension payments from the official government account (the Consolidated Fund), to the Public Service Supperanuation Fund (PSSF) where public workers contribute for their own retirement at the rate of 7.5 percent, with the government matching with a double the rate.
This means that in the future, public service pensioners will earn based on savings they made during their working years, as opposed to the previous system that was a defined amount.
A PSC analysis shows that as of last year (to June 2025), Kenya’s public service had a workforce with an average age of 41.8. The PSC did not report on the entire public service workforce, which has already crossed a million, but limited itself to about a quarter of the workforce, who are under its purview.
“The number of officers aged above 60 was 3,185 (1.3 percent), out of whom 506 were not eligible to serve beyond 60 years,” the PSC said.
Of the 9,665 employees who exited 287 institutions under PSC purview last year, 55 per cent retired normally.
Of the current workforce, the age bracket of 55 to 60 years, all of whom are expected to exit by 2030, constitute 10.01 percent (24,267 officers), the PSC says.
Majority of the officers aged over 60 are working under special provisions, including university lecturers, and research scientists and medical specialists.
Lecturers account for 1,920 of the number, followed by 559 PWDs, 132 research scientists and 68 Presidential appointees.
“Public institutions stand to benefit significantly from leveraging the accumulated expertise of this demographic through flexible work arrangements, consultancy engagements, and advisory roles that accommodate their circumstances while maximising knowledge extraction,” the PSC says.
A 2020 International Labour Organisation (ILO) working paper prepared the world for a more ageing workforce moving into the future, observing that as the length of life grows across countries, institutions will have to hold onto workers for longer years.
The paper titled ‘Population Ageing: Alternative measures of dependency and implications for the future of work’ observed that persons aged 55 and above are expected to outnumber children aged upto 14 by 2035, and the entire child and youth population aged 0 to 24 years by 2080.
“As a population ages, so does the workforce. Globally, the share of older workers aged 55 to 64 years in the total labour force has been increasing since 2000 and will continue to rise significantly. It is set to equal one quarter of the global labour force by 2030,” the ILO said.
