The salaries commission should do right

By Mugambi Nandi

Kenya: Upton Sinclair wrote that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Little wonder then that our assorted representatives have refused to see that our public wage bill is obscenely high and unsustainable.

The rise and rise of our public wage bill can be traced back to when President Moi appointed the “dream team” from the private sector to senior public offices. In keeping with the principle that an employee’s terms of employment cannot be changed to his disadvantage, the dream team retained high private sector salaries.

With this, the myth that the public sector could not pay six figure salaries – and more – was shattered. The Tenth Parliament grabbed the idea of high salaries and literally run amok with it. Perhaps President Kibaki could have reined in MPs. He did not. The politics of the day (and of every day since then) was such that he needed Parliament on his side.

Taking the cue from Parliament, the civil service followed suit. Strong arguments were made about the need to attract skill and talent from the private sector into the public sector, through competitive pay.

It was hoped that this would transform the public service and make it efficient. Top civil servants were engaged on high salaries never before seen in public service. Meanwhile, career civil servants remained on their lowly pay. Before long, murmurs begun to emerge about inequality of pay in the public service.

An eloquent argument was advanced for the “harmonization” of public service pay. It was argued, quite rightly, that it did not matter whether private sector men and women came from Mars or the Moon (whichever is farther from Planet Earth): equal work must attract equal pay! “Harmonisation” meant that salaries were bound to move only in one direction: vertically. The Committee of Experts saw the need to tame the public wage bill, and proposed the formation of a constitutional commission to determine public service salaries.

With a public wage bill of about 14 per cent of the country’s GDP, consuming over 50 percent of government expenditure, we are doing very badly. In high and middle income countries, public wages range between 6 percent and 22 percent of GDP and expenditures, respectively. We have no excuse for “outperforming” countries with significantly higher incomes than ours.

In determining public wages, the Salaries Commission was supposed to look at a number of factors such as the consumer price index trends, inflation trends and affordability. They probably did.

What is clear is that they also gave significant weight to the level of decibels in the cacophonous clamour for higher pay. If it were not so, county representatives would not earn more than real public servants such as teachers, doctors, nurses and policemen.

It is an open secret that the commission has been giving in to demands by increasing allowances through quiet boardroom deals. At the end of the day, the burden to the economy is not made lighter by the name by which the payments are called. Being a constitutional body, the Commission should perform its duties in accordance with its oath of office.

The commission should not give in to blackmail and threats. The President should reaffirm the Constitution by giving the salaries commission the political support it needs to tame the appetite for higher and higher pay.

I do not begrudge public servants their high salaries, but I think we need to take a reality check as a country. The Salaries Commission ought to be at the forefront in this. Public service needs to be about service to the country, not salaries, allowances and privileges. JF Kennedy’s plea to Americans that they should ask not what the country can do for them but what they can do for the country should echo in our hearts and minds. 

By The writer is a lawyer