On Monday, Devolution Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru launched the Capacity Assessment and Rationalisation Programme aimed at restructuring and making the Civil Service more productive.
This programme aims at assessing competence with a view to re-train, redeploy or transfer staff to other areas where they could excel.
It should not, however, be lost on many that the underlying reason behind all this could be the concern over an unsustainable public wage bill.
President Uhuru Kenyatta has time and again decried the fact that remuneration consumes 55 per cent of the country’s revenue. The tried and tested way all over the world is to put a freeze on employment, retrenchment and early retirement. In essence, therefore, the implication is that there could be layoffs despite all the assurances to the contrary. The danger of coerced retirement before the mandatory retirement age is real in such a scenario. Some could be victimised as well.
The need for efficiency and competence in the public service, long considered a den of corruption, cannot be over-emphasised. The general rot in the public service as evidenced by the activities that used to bedevil the Lands ministry, call for radical surgery.
The imbalances in staffing at several departments and in ministries are a direct consequence of nepotism and corruption. These are some of the practices that must be guarded against even as the Government seeks to maintain a balance and induce some sense of work ethic into the slimy, wasteful bureaucracy that is Kenya’s Civil Service.
First, transfers may be resisted by some employees and there is the attendant risk of some being fired for refusal to report to their new work stations. Redeployment may as well be counter-productive if in the process lethargy sets in.
The best chance for improving the civil service is in the retraining programme. The Government’s willingness to have its workforce undergo re-training to help it keep in touch with the ever-changing trends in service provision is what remains to be seen. All these measures must be undertaken in a humane manner. Some of the affected employees may have genuine reasons, like medical grounds, for opposing transfers.
Considering that counties are semi-autonomous, the idea of redeploying public servants to the counties may cause friction with the county governments.
Will these workers be on secondment since counties have their own recruitment policies and advertise for local jobs? Modalities for effecting staff transfers between the national and the county governments must be legally established.
Austerity measures in a bid to trim down the wage bill should be applied both horizontally and vertically.
The tendency has been to punish the common worker while there is more wastage at the top and the middle levels than at the bottom where a majority of the workers earn a pittance. In truth, legislators and chief executives in the public service draw huge salaries and allowances that cannot be justified.
We shall take the Government on its own word and believe there will be no layoffs.
Layoffs in Government tend to have a spill-over effect that might affect workers in the informal and private sectors because Government remains the biggest business partner for all.
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