Thanks for pay cut, now cut wastage and corruption

By Mugambi Nandi

As Sir Arnold explained to Bernard in the British comedy “Yes Minister”, the law of inverse relevance states that the less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it. In that spirit, let us talk about the public wage bill. A king-size wage bill is one of the two or three ugly monkeys which retired President Kibaki left at President Kenyatta’s doorstep as he exited State House with contentment. It is also the most agile one because it involves people who have the ability, and do not lack the courage to sabotage any attempts to reduce their earnings. Not too long ago we quoted Upton Sinclair, who wrote that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. The quote bears repeating.

To a regular public servant and a state officer, the important figure is what hits his bank account. He is unaffected and unmoved by stories about the public wage bill being 13% of the country’s GDP and 50% of the annual expenditure.

In his view, those are abstract figures. They could be from Cincinnati for all he cares. He is convinced that there is still room for a pay hike and a few more miscellaneous allowances. Add some foreign travel on benchmarking tours and conferences (the benefits of which we might live to see one day), and his joy is complete. If he has a corrupt mind, he sees nothing wrong with augmenting his “meagre” pay with government tenders at inflated prices, and kickbacks. 

The President has announced he and his cabinet will be taking a pay cut. Parastatal chiefs too have “agreed” to a pay cut in keeping with the wisdom of the saying that your superior’s wish is your command. (We hear that this is being interpreted in some quarters to mean reduction of productivity by a similar margin). We doubt the savings will be substantial, but we like the symbolism of the pay cuts. Enemies of development and cynics see this as nothing more than a populist political ploy, meant to hoodwink us into believing that “something” is being done to improve our lot.

The lower cadre of the civil service is still lowly paid. This category, we gather, is being spared further misery by keeping its pay intact. It is this cadre that the citizen often has to deal with when in need of government services. We have whined about the grief the citizen suffers in the hands of this cadre in a previous article, so we shall let the matter rest for now. Let us just say, in passing, that the low pay is deserved as it is commensurate with productivity, generally speaking. This is what Wahome Mutahi had in mind when he talked about workers pretending to work and employers pretending to pay them. The equation balances.

We were told that low pay in the civil service was the reason for low productivity, and bred corruption. We multiplied the pay a hundredfold, at the top. We now know that the corrupt will be corrupt as long as the pain of stealing is less than the pleasure of ill-gained wealth. We must save the national coffers from being milked dry. We need to reduce the size of government. We have too much of it and, with county governments, too “many” of it. We say eliminate wastage in government procurement, deal with corruption and improve productivity.

In the discourse on what to do about the runaway public wage bill, we know that it is the decibels that will count. Logic and good sense will have to wait at the end of the queue. Let us keep talking