A shocking revelation has emerged from Kitui County Referral Hospital, where police and county officials are grappling with a widening drug theft scandal — all unfolding under the watch of dead CCTV cameras that have been offline for months.
Channel 15 News has established that the hospital’s surveillance system, meant to monitor the movement of medical supplies and staff, has not been functional for at least three months. The Senate Health Committee, which toured the facility recently, raised the alarm over the matter, questioning how a major referral hospital could operate without a working security system.
“We were stunned to find that all CCTV cameras are off — yet this is a Level 5 hospital handling thousands of patients daily,” a member of the Senate Health Committee said during the visit.
The CCTV blackout is now at the center of investigations into a multimillion-shilling drug theft syndicate recently exposed at the hospital. Police on Thursday arrested a suspect and impounded a Subaru vehicle believed to have been used to ferry stolen medical supplies worth more than KSh 100,000.
The main suspect, a health worker linked to the hospital’s drug store, is still on the run. Police say she vanished moments before officers raided her residence at Slay Slay Estate, where cartons of gloves and other medical items had been hidden.
According to an OB entry seen by Channel 15 News, the arrest was made after a signal alert indicated that stolen medical supplies were being moved from the residence. Detectives found the suspect’s husband at home, but he later slipped away before the Subaru arrived to pick up the loot.
Kitui Central OCS Musa confirmed the incident, saying investigations were ongoing to establish the network behind the theft.
“One suspect is in custody, and we have recovered the vehicle used. We will give more details after further investigations,” he told Channel 15 News.
County Chief Officer for Drugs and Medical Supplies, Aggrey Kinyalili Kamba, said administrative procedures had already begun to determine how the drugs left the facility undetected.
“We are working to identify gaps in the hospital’s monitoring system and take appropriate disciplinary action,” he stated.
Security experts say the absence of CCTV footage has crippled accountability in the case — a stark contrast to recent events at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH), where functioning CCTV cameras helped detectives crack a shocking murder inside a ward.
In that case, detectives retrieved CCTV recordings that traced the movements of a suspect accused of killing a fellow patient — underscoring the vital role of surveillance in crime detection within hospitals.
“If Kitui Hospital’s cameras were working, the theft trail could have been clear. Now it’s word against word,” a police investigator familiar with the probe told Channel 15 News.
The ongoing crisis exposes a worrying pattern in public health facilities — where equipment meant for accountability lies idle, leaving the system vulnerable to theft, corruption, and cover-ups.
