President William Ruto speaks to the media at State House, Nairobi.
Here are a few points for President William Ruto to consider as he prepares to assemble a new Cabinet.
First, get rid of that cadre of political appointees known as ‘advisers’ that has overpopulated the civil service.
Here is a bit of background about this group. During the first term of former President Uhuru Kenyatta, a practice evolved whereby every Cabinet Secretary was allowed to appoint two advisers.
The jobs are not advertised and contracts are doled out to cronies under an arrangement known as ‘tenure by name’, meaning that you have to quit when the tenure of the Cabinet Secretary who appointed you has left office.
The system runs as follows: once you are appointed Cabinet Secretary, you just send two names to the Public Service Commission to be appointed as your advisers. The only check the PSC insists on is that the appointee is placed in a grade consonant with his qualifications.
Mark you, these are senior positions in the category of Job Group ‘R’ and ‘S’. It is a very unfair system to career civil servants because many public servants retire after working for 30 years without attaining the ranks accorded to these so called advisers.
The typical adviser storms into office and immediately starts demanding all manner of trappings of power, including huge red-carpeted corner offices, expensive four-wheel drive vehicles and opportunity to hire relatives. In most cases, career civil servants have to be moved out from their offices to create space for these political appointees.
Today, the public service bureaucracy is overpopulated with these advisers. In a good number of cases, some of them are hired on special contracts known as ‘salary to self’ agreements with special terms hidden in confidential clauses.
Lean public service bureaucracy
Where did it all start? The practice of hiring advisers for Cabinet Secretaries and for the President was adopted after the passage of the 2010 constitution ostensibly because it was the practice in presidential systems of government.
If we want a truly lean public service bureaucracy, then the brush used in sweeping away these opaquely recruited cronies of politicians will have to be extended to the County Government level.
We must clear out every adviser on taxpayer-funded salaries. Incidentally, how many advisers is a governor entitled to appoint?
Do we really have a way or system of checking abuse of discretion by governors when it comes to appointment of the so called advisers? We have too many advisers at the county government level.
Which brings me to my second point of what President Ruto must do as he prepares to reassemble the new Cabinet. He must merge state departments. In retrospect, former President Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta abused the power given to them by our laws to create too many state departments and too many principal secretaries.
Here is a bit of background. To reduce the size of the civil service bureaucracy, the framers of our Constitution put a cap on the maximum number of Cabinet ministers at 22 and a minimum of 14. The actual quote is as follows: “Not fewer than 14 but not more than 22 Cabinet Secretaries”.
However, the Constitution did not put a limit on the number of state departments or principal secretaries.
Eliminate functional overlaps
The political elite interpreted it as an attempt to limit their powers to dispense patronage to their cronies. So, they decided to exploit the law by creating as many state departments as they wanted so as to accommodate their cronies. This is why we have too many principal secretaries today.
Towards the end of Kenyatta’s tenure, the former Cabinet Secretary, Margaret Kobia, had five state departments and the same number Principal Secretaries under her watch. There was a time when the Ministry of Fisheries had a full state department with a mere 20 employees. It is that arbitrary.
What then should the President do? Merge all those state departments, send home the principal secretaries, eliminate functional overlaps and restore clear lines of command with the civil service bureaucracy.
In the initial stages of the administration, the Office of the Prime Cabinet Secretary was a small outfit housed at the National Treasury. Today, the department occupies humongous space at Railways Headquarters. Mr Musalia Mudavadi also has offices at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
I know of a top adviser to the President who occupies a whole floor at the prestigious and expensive Central Bank of Kenya Pensions Towers in Nairobi’s Central Business District.
President Ruto’s decision to dissolve the Cabinet has opened a window for us as a society to interrogate the impact of patronage-driven appointments on the ballooning cost of taxpayer-funded wages. Political patronage is why we have allowed the number of Principal Secretaries and advisers to mushroom and proliferate beyond the means of the taxpayer.
My parting shot is a message to President Ruto which is as follows: if, in assembling the Cabinet, you just bring a new lot before you do a thorough reorganisation of portfolios and without merging the mushrooming state departments, you will have engaged in an exercise in futility.
