The Deputy President is whingeing that the demands being made for elected representatives to scale down their financial avarice are unfair; the Deputy President wants the rank and file of the public service to follow suit. He, therefore, proposes that the rank and file share in the pain that is sure to follow when the Jubilee government embarks on the arduous task of cutting down the public wage bill. What has the Deputy President been smoking? (And can I get some?)
The lowest paid employee of the public service, one who is on a temporary contract, takes home about sh 8,000. Obviously, for the sake of humanity, this employee's wages are not on the chopping block. For the sake of argument, let us presume that all those who exist in job groups J and below will not face the financial guillotine. It is the "professional" cadres whose pay packets that the Deputy President and his hatchet men are coming after.
Let us assume, too for the sake of argument, that the Deputy President has no say on how the Judiciary, the Parliamentary Service, the assortment of commissions and independent offices, or the myriads of state corporations manage their wage bill; if he did, this conversation would be about harmonisation and rationalisation. Therefore, the Deputy President will go after a bunch of public officers who have done nothing short of letting go of their unbridled ambitions to work for the good of the nation. (At least that is what they will claim when they face economic hardship.)
The public wage bill has not ballooned because rank and file public officers are gouging the public purse for all it is worth; it has ballooned because the national and county governments' sizes are unsustainable. (And we do not mean the public officers who work in them, either.) The creation of the devolved units was a step in the right direction. The creation of county assemblies was inspired. The size of the county governments, for the most part set in stone by the Constitution, in the long run, will make for an efficient redistribution of national assets. However, there is absolutely no justifiable financial reason for the national government to have the number of commissions, independent offices or state corporations that it has. The Jubilee government has set the right tone by the rationalisation, harmonisation and guillotining of the state corporation sector. If the exercise is accomplished and its objects are met, the size of the wage bill that is giving the Deputy President nightmares will start to wind down.
Quite obviously it is our dark past that informs the establishment of so many commissions and independent offices. Their existence is a fit and proper. Their organisation, however, carries on the mistakes of the past. There is absolutely no sound financial reason why commissions should not have one commissioner overseeing a professional cadre of officers and staff to achieve the mandate of the commission. An excellent example is the Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution or the Kenya Law Reform Commission. The presence of permanent-and-pensionable commissioners, all existing in a financial realm of fancy where their every need seems to be catered for, is a grave error.
Right-sizing the commissions should be the Deputy Presidents main focus. There are too many commissioners doing very little that is worth mentioning. Indeed, this blogger would go so far as to argue that commissioners are glory hounds with very little to show for their presence on countless bodies. Their cost to the nation is too great to be sustained over the long term.
The other lot, of course, are the ones who give public service a bad name: Members of Parliament. Both senators and members of the National Assembly have betrayed the trust of the people, snuffling down billions from the Consolidated Fund every year and showing nothing for their greed other than an ever greater divided nation. It is time we cut our clothe to suit our needs. Chopping down the parliamentary wage bill and that of the commissions would be excellent first steps. The Deputy President should lay off the men and women who keep his government ticking over.
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