By Charles Kanjama

Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello and Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep in David Copperfield have one thing in common. They are famous literary characters that epitomise envy.

Iago was the trusted adviser of Othello, who wrecks the harmony between Othello and his wife Desdemona principally due to envy. Uriah is the slithery character whose abiding envy of his partner Wickfield leads to all sorts of plots and stratagems.

Envy and jealousy are brothers although often confused as identical twins. They typically both involve discontent, unhappiness or sadness in relation to another person. Sadness, as opposed to sorrow, is a human vulnerability which if not corrected opens the door of the human will for virtue to depart and vice to enter in its place.

Envy and jealousy are similar because they both involve comparison of the self with another. Envy means sadness that another enjoys what I lack, while jealousy means sadness or anger that another is enjoying what I had.

Envy, the numbing sadness that despises and seeks to tear down the other because he has something I don’t, is always morally wrong. Jealousy in contrast may sometimes be righteous wrath, for example a jealous wife upset at an interloper, or a jealous God raging at idol worship.

Because we live in society, we constantly observe one another in relation to another person. In doing so, it is human to make comparisons, especially to compare ourselves with others.

Comparisons always involve a measure of judgment. Since we often lack adequate information and criteria to make objective judgments about others, the saying, “Comparisons are odious” often holds true.

Nonetheless, it is clearly observable that our measure of contentment and even happiness often depends on the results of conscious or unconscious comparisons. At the workplace for example, a big chunk of dissatisfaction comes not from absolute but relative considerations of remuneration (‘my boss earns two times my pay, but only does half the work I do’).

In traffic, you hardly notice when your lane is moving faster, but will quickly notice when you are in a slower lane. And so on.

Since we instinctively assume that more money means more happiness, income disparity quickly causes discontent. If we are honest, the recent rage against MP benefits includes a measure of envy. This envy must be extirpated so that we can look at the entire public sector wage bill objectively.

Institutionalised envy produces socialism, which Winston Churchill famously called “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Objectively, excessive income disparity harms human dignity, damages economic development and injures social cohesion. In Kenya, it is not just MPs earning more than they should: the entire public sector wage bill is unsustainable, and so is the income disparity between civil servants, which apparently rises to 100:1 between its topmost and lowest echelons.

 There is also a problem when the average public sector job, without business risk but with extra perks, is remunerated better than a comparable private sector job.

That is why I am excited about the declared intention by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) to harmonise state and public officer jobs, especially by chopping off the higher cadre remuneration and boosting the lower cadre remuneration.

I am persuaded that SRC is the most important commission in Kenya today, with the electoral commission in second place. In SRC’s hands rests a golden opportunity of setting Kenya along the path to prosperity by rationalising and taming the spiralling public sector wage bill.

But they must strike while the iron is hot, meaning between now and March 2013. Wish them luck.

We hope that as they act, they will not become obsessed about this niggling fact, that by setting lower salaries for the higher cadre state officers, they will also be setting lower salaries for themselves!

 The writer is an Advocate of the High Court