How a County Assembly Removes a County Executive Committee Member

Updated 2 October 2026.

A county executive committee member can lose the job two ways. The Governor can dismiss them, or the County Assembly can force the Governor to.

Both routes sit in the County Governments Act 2012, and the second one is the one nobody explains.

How a CEC member gets the job in the first place

Understanding the removal requires understanding the appointment.

The Governor nominates. The County Assembly vets the nominee and either approves or rejects. The appointment takes effect on approval. An executive committee member is not a member of the county assembly, and the Constitution keeps those two roles separate on purpose.

Article 179(3) of the Constitution caps how many executive committee members a county may have, by reference to the size of its county assembly: one third of the assembly's membership where it has fewer than thirty members, and ten where it has thirty or more. Check your county against that clause rather than against a number somebody quoted at a public meeting.

Each member runs a department and answers for it twice over: to the Governor, and to the assembly committee that shadows the department.

The grounds for removal

The Act lists them, and it is not a general dissatisfaction clause.

A motion for removal must be founded on gross violation of the Constitution or of any other law, incompetence, abuse of office, gross misconduct, or conviction for an offence punishable by at least six months in prison. That is section 40(2) as amended in 2020. A member who is merely unpopular, or on the losing side of a political fight, fits none of those on paper.

In practice, grounds are drafted to fit. Which is exactly why the procedure that follows, and the record it produces, decide whether a removal survives.

The procedure, step by step

A member of the assembly proposes the motion. It has to specify the grounds and the facts alleged, not a general complaint.

The motion needs support. At least one third of all the members of the county assembly must support it before it proceeds. This is a real filter in a divided assembly and no filter at all in a unified one.

A select committee investigates. If the threshold is met, the assembly appoints a select committee of its own members to investigate the allegations. The Act fixes both the size of that committee and the deadline for its report, so read the current section rather than trusting a remembered figure.

The committee reports. If it finds the allegations unsubstantiated, the matter ends and no further proceedings are taken on it.

The assembly votes. If the committee finds the allegations substantiated, the assembly votes on the finding. If a majority of all the members vote to uphold it, the Governor is required to dismiss the member.

Note what is missing compared with a Governor's removal: no Senate stage, no second house, no external body. It begins and ends inside the county assembly. The Governor's route is far longer and much harder, which is why impeaching a Governor is a separate article.

Where these decisions get challenged

In the High Court, and usually on process rather than on substance.

A removal is a decision affecting a person's rights, so the fair hearing requirements of the Constitution apply to it. The arguments that recur are that the member was never given the particulars of the allegations, was not given a reasonable opportunity to respond, or that the select committee did not genuinely investigate anything. Removals have been set aside on grounds of that kind.

An assembly that wants a removal to survive review documents everything: the motion as filed, the notice given to the member, the member's written response, the committee's record of evidence, and the vote as recorded in the Hansard. An assembly that skips the record hands the member a case.

Why this matters to a voter, not only to an assembly

It is the sharpest tool an MCA has.

An assembly that cannot get answers from a department has escalating options: a question, a committee summons, a censure motion, and finally this. Most stop long before the last one, which is often reasonable, but a member who says nothing can be done about a failing department is describing their own choices rather than the law.

The debates and the committee reports are public. So is the vote.

Before 10 August 2027, ask your MCA one question on this: has the assembly ever moved on a departmental failure that residents raised, and if so what happened at each stage? Then check the answer against the Hansard through the clerk. The assembly's working year explains how to get hold of it.