Tame public wage bill
Emmanuel Atonya signs a document during the collection of signatures by Thirdway Alliance Party Leader, Ekuru Aukot, during the ‘Punguza Mizigo’ campaign in Eldoret town on October 26, 2018.
Undoubtedly, the public wage bill has ballooned over the years with the runaway civil service payroll the proverbial millstone around the Jubilee administration’s neck.
National Treasury data show public servants’ salaries and wages hit Sh386.38 billion in the nine months to March, compared to Sh352.21 in March last year, an increment of 9.7 per cent. According to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) figures, the government hired 38,500 staff last year, increasing the staff complement to 923,100 from 884,600 in 2020.
The number of government employees shot up to 884,000 in 2020 from 653,500 in 2010, with the total wage bill increasing by 184.66 per cent to Sh694 billion from Sh241.83 billion. The public wage bill has astronomically increased from Sh434.9 billion in the 2012/13 fiscal year to Sh827 billion in 2019/2020.
The Treasury is set to spend Sh507 billion on salaries by the end of the month, taking the wage bill to 48.1 per cent of total revenue. That is contrary to the Public Finance Management Act 2015 cap at 35 per cent of the equitable revenue share, hence at variance with Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Globally, the public wage bill should be 7.5 per cent of GDP.
Public servants make up less than 10 per cent of Kenyans but their pay takes more than half of taxes.
The financial implications of employing public servants as a popularity stunt or to reward political failures is counterproductive. It impedes infrastructure development, service delivery, poverty eradication, food security, job creation, universal health coverage, affordable housing, economic rejuvenation and attainment of development goals.
It is about time the government tamed the bloated public wage bill and runway allowances to pull the country out of the current economic morass and recession. For a start, retrench redundant public servants, smoke out ghost workers and cut the rot of graft and wastefulness in the public sector.
Mr Muthama is a business and strategic management lecturer at JKUAT, consultant and author. [email protected].
