Last Friday, the High Court in Kenya delivered a directive to the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, ordering it to reduce the public wage bill.
As it currently stands, the 1.05 million public servants are collectively paid Sh1.24 trillion out of the Sh3.06 trillion that is collected as Kenya’s ordinary revenue every year.
The amount that is allocated to salaries and remunerations, therefore, is 40 percent of the revenue we net (not forgetting that the amount allocated to debt repayments is 69 percent, which means that we have to borrow another nine percent to top up this deficit).
The High Court, wants the ratio of the wage bill to ordinary revenue reduced to 35 percent.
One of the main ways that has been suggested to help achieve this is through retrenchment of public workers.
The commission believes that it can cut down on the number of workers through conducting an audit over the whole public sector in order to purge officers with fake certificates, as well as mitigating the overlap and duplication of roles in the public service thus getting rid of the unnecessary workers.
The thing about being a student of history is that we can look back at instances when such attempts were made and analyse whether they worked. One that comes to mind easily is the Dream Team that was formed in 1999 by President Moi.
When Kenya needed to borrow money from the IMF, one of the pre-conditions that they had given us before offering us the loan, was streamline of the civil service. Thenceforth, they embarked on massive retrenchment of the civil service, firing some 250,000 public staff.
Despite how right the concept felt on paper, it didn’t lead to the intended results. And it is for the same reasons that it wouldn’t be the solution now.
Here’s why: our public service hasn’t hit the optimal staffing levels. For example, the recommended doctor-patient ratio by the WHO is 1:1000. However, the doctor-patient ratio in Kenya is 1:(more than) 10000. On the other hand, the recommended teacher-student ratio is 1:25 but in Kenya it is 1:50.
Therefore, why would we cut down on the number of public servants at the detriment of service delivery to citizens? This would be an act of self-sabotage.
During the National Wage Bill Conference in 2024, the PSC presented an analysis which showed that, across all its organisations in the service sector, they have a deficit of at least 109,770 workers, which meant that they’re operating at 67 percent capacity.
Now, how would reducing the number even further be beneficial for the country? What is mostly needed, which everyone agrees on, is to cut down on the perks and allowances earned by our elected representatives.
All allowances that they earn gobble a huge chunk of the wage bill.
We can use our Members of Parliament as an example.
Besides the monthly basic salary that they receive (of Sh621,250), they also get a committee sitting allowance of Sh80,000, a transport allowance of Sh738,833 (add that to the Sh7.5 million car grant that they receive every term), airtime of Sh15,000 and a daily subsistence allowance of Sh18,200. This brings their monthly salary to a total gross of Sh1,473,283.
What our MPs receive every month for their airtime is equivalent to what ECDE teachers earn as their total salary every month. Now, before anything, we all agree that it’s demeaning to pay our teachers (whom we entrust our kids with) such a demeaning amount, right?
Therefore, we would be doing a disservice to our children, and our nation in general, to take those jobs away from them.
And additionally, the effects of that would merely be a drop in the ocean in terms of reducing the ballooning wage bill.
Therefore, the parliamentarians should be the ones to have their salaries face the chop. Just like other employees, they should face an appraisal at the moment and have their salaries decreased to save our wage bill.