Who Is Exercising the Engineers Board of Kenya’s Statutory Authority?

Last Updated 1 day ago by Kenya Engineer

The most recent EBK Board was appointed in 2019 for a three-year term and subsequently renewed for one further three-year term. The second term came to an end in 2025. The outgoing Board was formally recognised by EBK at a farewell dinner in October 2025 after six years of service. More than a year later, there is no newly constituted Board in place.

EBK, however, has not stopped working.

Its Secretariat remains active. Engineers continue to interact with the regulator. Accreditation, registration, compliance, professional development and other regulatory activities continue. EBK continues to represent Kenya in international engineering forums and its website continues to publish regulatory and institutional activities.

That leaves a question that deserves a clear public answer: Who is currently exercising the statutory authority of the Engineers Board of Kenya?

This is not a question about the competence or commitment of EBK’s Secretariat. Nor is it an accusation against the Cabinet Secretary, IEK or any individual involved in the appointment process. It is a governance question arising from the way Kenya’s Engineers Act structures the regulator.

The previous Board’s tenure has ended and the process of constituting a new Board has encountered further complications, including a court order temporarily stopping an IEK-led nomination process in September 2026.

The question is what this means for the exercise of statutory powers.

EBK is a permanent institution. The Board is not.

The Engineers Act establishes the Engineers Board of Kenya as a body corporate with perpetual succession. EBK is not dissolved because individual Board members leave office. The institution has corporate continuity.

The Board’s membership, however, is not perpetual.

Section 11 of the Engineers Act provides that, except for ex-officio members, a Board member holds office for three years and is eligible for reappointment for one further three-year term.

This creates two different forms of continuity. There is institutional continuity: EBK continues to exist. Then there is governance continuity: the statutory Board remains capable of exercising the powers assigned to it by Parliament.

The first can continue when the second does not. That is the issue Kenya needs to confront.

Who is actually responsible for putting the Board in place?

This is an important part of the story because the Engineers Act does not leave the composition of the Board entirely open.

Section 5 establishes a Board made up of both ex-officio and appointed members.

The Board consists of the Principal Secretary responsible for engineering matters, the Principal Secretary responsible for finance, the Principal Secretary responsible for higher education, the Chairperson of the Institution of Engineers of Kenya and the Registrar.

In addition, the Act provides for seven persons to be appointed by the Cabinet Secretary.

Those seven are drawn from specific categories:

• three persons representing different engineering disciplines, nominated by the Institution of Engineers of Kenya;
• one public officer from a public corporation involved in engineering;
• one representative of universities nominated by universities offering accredited engineering courses in Kenya; and
• two persons from the private sector.

The Act further requires persons appointed under this category to be registered professional engineers.

The Chairperson is also appointed by the Cabinet Secretary, but from among the seven persons appointed under section 5(1)(g).

This makes the respective roles fairly clear.

IEK has a nomination role. The Cabinet Secretary has the appointment role.

The process does not envisage IEK appointing the Board. Nor does it envisage the Secretariat appointing the Board. The final appointment of the seven members rests with the Cabinet Secretary, who also appoints the Chairperson from among those appointed members.

The current Ministry of Roads and Transport identifies EBK among the state agencies under the Ministry, while the Engineers Act refers to the Cabinet Secretary responsible for matters relating to engineering.

The Act therefore provides a relatively clear architecture for succession. What it does not provide is an equally clear mechanism for what happens between the expiry of one Board’s term and the appointment and assumption of office of its successor.

That is the exact setting we are currently in.

The Engineers Act gives the Board considerable powers

The title “Board” can make the EBK governance structure sound more administrative than it actually is. It is not just an oversight committee sitting above a professional bureaucracy. Section 7(1) of the Engineers Act gives the Board extensive regulatory powers.

Among other things, the Board receives and determines applications for registration, maintains the Register, issues licences, conducts inquiries, inspects engineering sites and premises, assesses foreign engineering qualifications, evaluates engineering programmes and approves and accredits engineering programmes offered by universities and other tertiary institutions.

Its responsibilities extend further.

The Board sets standards for engineers, prepares curricula for registration and conducts professional examinations. It oversees continuing professional development, collaborates with engineering institutions, determines fees charged by professional engineers and firms, hears and determines disputes concerning professional conduct and ethics, develops and enforces the engineering code of ethics and determines recognised engineering disciplines.

It also has responsibility for recruitment of EBK staff.

This is a substantial concentration of regulatory authority.

What does the Secretariat do?

The Engineers Act creates the office of the Registrar. The Registrar is the chief executive of the Board and is responsible for the day-to-day management of EBK, subject to the direction of the Board.

That wording is important. The Secretariat is designed to administer the regulator. It is not established as an alternative statutory Board.

There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. Most regulators have a similar division between governance and administration.

The Board establishes the regulatory direction and exercises powers assigned to it by law. The Secretariat implements decisions, processes applications, conducts technical and administrative work and manages the institution’s daily affairs.

EBK’s own description of its committees illustrates the distinction.

Its committees undertake important technical and administrative functions. The Finance, Administration and General Purpose Committee, for example, oversees finance and administration, implementation of the Board’s strategies, regulatory development and policy issues. But its responsibilities include scrutinising policy issues before transmitting them to the Board for decision. The same committee is also described as handling urgent and emergency issues on behalf of the Board.

That structure raises a fundamental question when there is no fully constituted Board: Where does a matter end when the law says the Board must make the decision?

Not every EBK activity requires a Board meeting

It would be wrong to suggest that the absence of a constituted Board automatically paralyses EBK. Routine administration can continue.

Employees can report to work. Existing policies can be implemented. Technical officers can inspect sites. Applications can be received and processed. Existing contracts can be administered. International engagements can continue.

EBK’s continued activity demonstrates this. Its website continues to publish regulatory activities and its Secretariat remains operational. The issue is not whether the Secretariat can keep the organisation functioning.

Clearly it can. The more difficult question is whether every statutory power assigned to the Board can continue to be exercised in the absence of a constituted Board. The answer cannot safely be assumed to be yes.

The Act itself recognises the importance of Board authority

Section 9 allows the Board to delegate functions to committees, members, officers, employees or agents of EBK by resolution. That provision is significant.

Delegation is not presented as an automatic transfer of Board powers to the Secretariat whenever the Board is unavailable. It is a power of the Board.

This raises an important governance question: When a Board’s term has expired, what is the legal status of delegations that previously existed, and who has authority to make new delegations of Board functions?

That is a question for legal interpretation, not something an opinion article like this one can answer conclusively. But it illustrates the problem created when an institution has a functioning administrative arm but no clearly functioning governance organ.

Some decisions are particularly difficult to separate from the Board

The Act expressly assigns the Board responsibilities that go beyond routine administration.

Consider professional discipline. The Board is empowered to hear and determine disputes relating to professional conduct and ethics. It also has powers under the disciplinary provisions of the Act to inquire into the conduct of registered and licensed persons and impose sanctions where the statutory conditions are met.

Consider accreditation. The Board is responsible for approving and accrediting engineering programmes.

Consider professional standards. The Board determines engineering disciplines and sets standards for engineers.

Consider fees. The Board determines fees charged by professional engineers and firms.

Consider staffing. The Act assigns recruitment of Board staff to the Board.

These are not clerical functions. They involve the exercise of statutory authority. That is why the absence of a properly constituted Board deserves more attention than a routine delay in filling vacancies.

The Board’s own rules underline the problem

The Schedule to the Engineers Act requires the Board to meet at least once every three months.

It establishes a quorum of two-thirds of the members, or a greater number determined by the Board in respect of an important matter. Decisions are made by a majority of members present and voting.

Interestingly, the Schedule also says that proceedings of the Board are not invalidated merely because of a vacancy among the members or a defect in the appointment or qualification of a member.

That provision is useful when a Board has some vacancies. It is much less obvious how it solves the problem of an entire Board reaching the end of its statutory tenure.

A vacancy within a Board is one thing. The expiration of the tenure of the Board itself is another. This is precisely where Parliament may need to provide greater clarity.

The IEK nomination process has now complicated matters further

There is another dimension to the issue.

In August 2026, the Institution of Engineers of Kenya initiated a process to nominate persons to the EBK Board through an Expression of Interest dated 25 August.

That process was subsequently challenged in court.

On 2 September, the High Court issued conservatory orders suspending implementation, continuation or completion of the IEK nomination process. The orders also restrained IEK and its officers, council, committees, agents and representatives from shortlisting, selecting, nominating or transmitting names to the Cabinet Secretary arising from that process. The Cabinet Secretary was similarly restrained from acting on nominations arising from the disputed process.

The substantive dispute has not been determined merely because these interim orders were issued. The court has not finally declared the IEK nomination process unlawful. It has temporarily stopped the process while the issues raised in the case are heard. The inter partes hearing is scheduled for 26 October 2026.

The petitioner’s arguments nevertheless raise questions that deserve attention.

Among the issues raised is whether the nomination process was commenced with the requisite authority under the IEK Constitution and the Engineers Act. The petitioner also questioned the circumstances surrounding the Expression of Interest and raised concerns about an earlier nomination list allegedly submitted to the Cabinet Secretary in November 2025 whose status he says remains unresolved.

Those are allegations and legal arguments by the petitioner, not findings of the court.

There are arguments on both sides of the court intervention

There is a legitimate argument for allowing the court process to run its course. Appointments to a statutory regulator should comply with the law.

If there is a genuine question about whether the nominating institution followed its own constitution or whether the process complied with the Engineers Act, resolving that question before appointments are made protects the legitimacy of the eventual Board. A Board appointed through a process later found to be defective could face its own legal challenges.

The countervailing concern is continuity.

Every additional delay extends the period in which the regulator must operate without a fully constituted Board. That creates a governance problem even where the underlying legal challenge is entirely legitimate.

The solution, in other words, should not be to bypass judicial scrutiny. It should be to design the law so that a legitimate dispute over succession does not leave a regulator without its principal governance organ for an extended period.

Kenya can learn from the problem

It would be easy to turn this into a dispute about the Cabinet Secretary, IEK, EBK or individual engineers. That would miss the larger issue.

Board appointments are vulnerable to delays for many reasons. Nomination processes can take time. Government appointments can take time. Changes in leadership can interrupt processes. Legal challenges can freeze appointments. None of these events is unusual.

What is unusual is designing a statutory regulator in which the administrative institution is expected to continue operating while the law provides no obvious, express mechanism for a time-limited transition when the Board reaches the end of its term.

The answer does not need to be to extend every Board indefinitely. There is a more practical solution.

Kenya should introduce a statutory caretaker provision

The Engineers Act should be amended to provide for continuity after the expiry of a Board’s term. A possible model would allow members of an outgoing Board to remain in office for a maximum of 12 months or until their successors assume office, whichever occurs first.

But this continuation should come with a deliberately reduced mandate. The outgoing Board would become a caretaker Board.

It could:

• oversee essential statutory functions;
• approve matters necessary for the continued operation of EBK;
• deal with disciplinary and regulatory matters that cannot reasonably wait;
• approve essential financial and administrative decisions;
• maintain existing regulatory standards and programmes;
• ensure that the Secretariat continues functioning; and
• perform other functions necessary to prevent institutional paralysis.

At the same time, the caretaker Board could be restricted from:

• making major structural changes to EBK;
• adopting major new policies;
• making long-term strategic commitments;
• undertaking substantial changes to fees or regulatory architecture;
• making senior appointments that would bind a successor Board; or
• taking other decisions that would normally belong to a fully mandated Board.

Such restrictions would protect against an outgoing Board using a transitional period to make decisions of long-term consequence.

The principle would be simple: No regulatory vacuum, but no opportunity for an expired Board to govern indefinitely.

Twelve months should be a ceiling, not an invitation to delay

A continuity provision should not become an excuse for government to postpone appointments. The law could require the appointment process to begin well before the expiry of the existing Board.

For example, the succession process could be required to commence at least six months before the end of the Board’s term.

The Cabinet Secretary could then be given a statutory period within which the appointments must be completed. The caretaker provision would function as a safety net, not the normal system. If appointments are completed on time, the outgoing Board leaves office as scheduled. If the process is delayed, the institution does not suddenly lose its principal governance organ. If a court challenge intervenes, the regulator continues to operate while the courts determine the dispute.

That is the type of institutional resilience that a modern regulatory framework should provide.

The bigger question is not who sits on the Board

There is a temptation to view this controversy through the personalities involved. That is understandable but too narrow. The important question is whether Kenya’s engineering regulator has a governance system capable of surviving the ordinary interruptions that occur in public administration.

The Engineers Board regulates a profession whose decisions affect public safety. Engineers design bridges, roads, buildings, dams, water systems, factories, energy infrastructure and digital infrastructure. The regulator’s decisions have consequences far beyond the engineering profession itself.

The public interest requires EBK to have both a capable Secretariat and a properly constituted governance structure. One cannot permanently substitute for the other.

Who, then, is exercising EBK’s statutory authority?

That is the question Kenya should now ask. EBK is clearly functioning as an institution. Its Secretariat is working. Its Acting Registrar/CEO is performing administrative responsibilities. Its regulatory programmes continue.

But the Engineers Act does not give the Secretariat the entire statutory mandate of the Board. Parliament gave particular powers to the Board. Some can be administered through the Secretariat and committees. Others involve decisions that the Act expressly assigns to the Board.

That creates a governance boundary which should not be left to assumption.

The present situation is also a reminder that perpetual succession of a corporate body is not the same thing as perpetual continuity of its governing board. EBK can continue to exist while its Board changes.

What Kenya’s law lacks is a sufficiently clear bridge between those two states. That bridge is what Parliament should consider building.

A properly designed caretaker provision, limited to a maximum of 12 months and accompanied by a reduced mandate, would give Kenya a mechanism for maintaining regulatory continuity while preserving the principle that Board members should serve defined terms. It would also reduce the pressure created every time an appointment process is delayed, contested or challenged in court.

The current debate around the EBK Board offers Parliament an opportunity to address that structural weakness.

Kenya should fix the succession mechanism before the next term expires.