Over the years, the civil service in Kenya has been an item previous regimes have been using as a dangling carrot and bait to prospective voters in order to ascend to power. People vying for various seats; from the lowest in the county assembly to the highest office in the land occupying state house, the campaign slogan had been well rehearsed. Elect me to the office and i promise to protect your interests as a community and employ your people to key government positions.
This was the genesis of a bloated civil service in Kenya that took place the moment the colonial government left our country and the first African leader took over the reigns of power. Successive regimes perfected this act in order to gain and cement loyalty from certain parts of the country.
Cabinet ministers in charge of various ministries, ensured they lined up their tribesmen/women in those ministries-the lower academic qualifications notwithstanding- from the messenger running errands to the tea girl and directors of various projects. Each ministry therefore came to symbolize the dominance of certain ethnic groups to the utter exclusion of others who supposedly failed to tore the line and in stead voted for the opposition. This trend was also witnessed in terms of the skewed developments that took place in various parts of the country. Some regions received funds for constructing good roads and hospitals while others lack even a single kilometer of tarmacked road or piped water.
This trend gave birth to what is now a hot issue among public servants related to inefficiency in service delivery in the public service and an ever increasing public wage bill with little output to show. This brings to mind the structural adjustment programs popularly known SAPS that were spearheaded by the world bank in Kenya in the early 80's. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the SAPs were aimed at restoring efficiency in all sectors of the economy with the end goal of raising economic growth rate. One of the hallmarks of SAPs was to restructure the public service which included taking drastic measures like retrenching people and focus government resources on development. The consequences of SAPs were short term and dire with some economic pundits pegging the runaway inflation, crime rates and unemployment rates experienced during that time as a byproduct of these measures.
The jubilee government has been at the forefront in sorting out the mess that is the civil service in line with its manifesto of restoring efficiency in government services. This follows a recent pronouncement by the vice president to the effect that the government cannot achieve its development objectives if it continues to spend over 70% of its collected revenues on recurrent expenditure(basically paying salaries) while only the remaining 30% left for development.
In order to restore efficiency, the government has adopted ICT in its operations which has seen some improvements in the public service. The next step which involves cutting down the public wage bill will either be achieved by reducing salaries or retrenching a huge number of redundant workforce. The latter option would obviously make economic sense though not a panacea to the problems bedeviling the public service.
Hard decisions and choices would have to be made with huge political ramifications to both the president and his deputy considering the fact that a huge number of the public servants hail from communities that traditionally enjoyed power since we gained independence.
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