Painful death: How top TSC director suffered until his demise in his rented house in Malava

Kakamega North Subcounty Teachers Service Commission (TSC) director Justus Ndubi was found dead in his house in Malava town after after fighting work related depression and the death of his wife nearly a year ago.

The TSC had failed to secure a transfer back to Nairobi so that he attends to his sickly wife.

His transfer away from his ailing wife is said to have hit him hard sinking into depression.

A graduate of Moi University, Ndubi was plucked from the discipline department at the TSC headquarters and transferred to Lunga Lunga suncounty in Kwale in 2018,which boarders Tanzania on the coastal strip and it is one of the remotest subcounties in the region.

At the time,his wife was sickly with terminal illness, and he asked TSC to consider reposting him back to the headquarters or any subcounty within Nairobi in order for him to provide support and care for her.

However, he was transferred to Kakamega North Subcounty in the Western region.

His wife died last year, upon which Ndubi wrote an emotional message to the CEO Dr Nancy Macharia and the former staffing director Rita Wahome.

Dear Nancy Macharia and Rita Wahome? You transferred me from Nairobi to Kwale. I appealed to be rerouted to the environs of Nairobi because my wife had chronic kidney failure and I used to take her to Nairobi Hospital twice a week for dialysis and look for blood donors after every two weeks. You didn’t bother to hear my predicament. Instead, you transferred me to Kakamega, a distance of more than 1000km, and yet I reside in Nairobi. You denied me transfer allowance, saying I had requested to move near home, and yet I don’t have a home in Kisii. Now my wife is in Chiromo mortuary. I should have cared for her a bit, but you were so heartless. Don’t issue a circular about her death. Whoever can forward kindly do so,” he wrote.

The message was widely shared and circulated to his colleagues and workmates 25 th May 2023 on various platforms.

According to his colleagues, the wife died alone in Nairobi, and this left him hurt, and he changed drastically.

They said he would show up at work late, missed crucial meetings, at times spoke to himself, and kept to himself quite often. He was also said to have isolated himself from his friends and family, raising a huge concern.

He also went into heavy drinking, a behaviour his peers say was quite unusual.

“He was clearly depressed especially after the death of his wife. He no longer had a desire to work and several times talked about death,” one of his workmates in Western Kenya told Mulembe news.

His colleagues said he had failed to show up at work on the fateful day. They checked on him at his house, only to find it locked from inside.

It was then that the police were alerted, who broke into the house and found his body lying in a pool of blood. The postmortem conducted later indicated that he died of cardiac arrest.