Time for civil servants to deliver as per State annual targets is now

Last week, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) released its public service job evaluation report.

It is should be remembered that the process of evaluating the public service sector started in May 2015 after Parliament met to deliberate on a policy document prepared by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) with a view to determining the apt pay for public service employees.

The lack of a centralised framework for pay determination had occasioned pay disparities, which have not only been the cause of industrial action and demands for better remuneration, but a rising wage bill as well.

The SRC was established by an act of Parliament in 2010 basically to harmonise salaries. It was granted the authority to set and periodically review the remuneration and benefits for all State officers.

SRC’s mandate is expanded to include advising the national and county governments on remuneration and benefits for public officers. Besides these roles, the Constitution grants SRC power to address many other issues that impact on the economic growth and development of our country.

For long, Kenya’s public service sector was notorious for absenteeism. Every office one visited, the spectacle was that of empty chairs whose occupants busied themselves elsewhere.

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The average Kenyan’s encounter was unfailingly that of a coat permanently hung on a seat staring at them. There have been two schools of thought; that the Kenyan civil servant is paid too much for doing too little; or as in communist Russia, the workers pretended to work and the Government pretended to pay.

Not until Huduma Centres arrived in 2013 did Kenyans know what it means to be served well, with a smile, a measure of kindness and common courtesy. Now a new dawn is beckoning in the civil service following the release of SRC's new grading scheme.

The new system, which has determined the intrinsic value of every job, is welcome relief for taxpayers. It is also a morale booster because the new scheme is geared towards rewarding effort.

The new guidelines will help the country move away from the grandstanding witnessed when, in its formative days, SRC met stiff resistance from Members of Parliament.

MPs spiritedly sought to split hairs to stay out of the SRC’s ambit in the determination of salaries. Similarly, SRC met resistance from teachers unions, which also did not agree to staff appraisals and determination of their salaries.

SRC’s wider scope demands it be allowed to do its work to level the playing field for all public service workers. It behoves SRC to ensure  the expenditure on public wage bill is affordable and fiscally sustainable unlike now that salaries are in excess of the ceiling set by the Public Finance Management Act (2012).

Last year, the Controller of Budget's report showed counties spent Sh74.12 billion on salaries and only Sh51.23 on development projects. The capacity of an excessive wage bill to bog down development programmes cannot be over-emphasised, hence the need for centralised controls. A huge wage bill is an indication of a bloated, inefficient and expensive public service sector.