House plots to send MPs, women reps home to curb huge wage bill

MPs in session. Parliamentary Committee on Finance, Planning and Trade chaired by Ainamoi MP Benjamin Langat says what people need is development not over representation. [PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

 

By Jackson Okoth and James ANYANZWA

Kenya: Two key parliamentary committees have raised the red flag over inflated cost of running the devolved system of government.

They have hinted at a possible introduction of a motion in Parliament to amend the Constitution to scrap certain cadre of personnel on Government payroll. The move is likely to put Parliament on collision course with the Executive, after President Uhuru Kenyatta publicly opposed changes to the new laws.

The Parliamentary Committee on Finance, Planning and Trade chaired by Ainamoi MP Benjamin Langat has laid bare proposals that if adopted, will save the country about Sh6 billion annually. “This money could be channeled through the constituency development fund kitty with each constituency receiving at least Sh20 million.

Overrepresented

“This money can also be used to finance education of 500 needy students in each constituency,” said Langat. He argues against what he terms as over-representation and that what people need is development and not representation.

 Langat said there is serious duplication in Parliament, which needs to be eradicated. Micah Cheserem, Chairman, Commission on Revenue Allocation (CRA) also warns that the prevailing huge public service wage bill is a monster that must be quickly addressed.

“What is more worrying is the fact that county governments are currently hiring new employees, which can only balloon the public wage bill, swelling to bursting proportions,” explained Cheserem.

 Proposals by the Finance Committee seek to abolish the position of 20 nominated senators and 47 seats occupied by women representatives. Also to be sent packing are 770 nominated members to the county assembly (MCAs), who constitute more than half of the elected MCAs totaling 1,450. The committee said this move could save the country Sh600 million by sending the nominated senators away and another Sh1.41 billion for sending all the women reps. Another Sh4.62 billion could be realised by making all the 770 nominated MCAs redundant.

The Parliamentary Budget and Appropriations Committee has also weighed in on the matter. It has recommended a social economic audit of the entire Constitution, whose cost of implementation has been a heavy burden to the taxpayer.

 Trend analysis of Kenya’s public wage bill by the Transition Authority indicates it has almost doubled from Sh241 billion in 2008/9 to Sh458 billion in 2012/13.

Seconded staff

 It is observed that burgeoning wage bill could get worse if nothing is done now. For instance, County Governments are busy setting up their public service boards and recruiting staff whose roles and responsibilities run parallel to those performed by seconded staff from the national government.

 The entire old provincial administration structure is still intact and drawing salaries from the exchequer. Figures indicate that the defunct provincial administration has over 12,000 officers and other supporting staff. Even with this idle structure draining the paymaster, county governments are busy recruiting their own personnel. The other emerging challenge is the existence of parallel administrative structure between the county and the national government with duplicating and overlapping roles and responsibilities.

Cheserem has urged authorities responsible to consider setting up a task force to see how the provincial administration could be restructured within the next six months.

“This is to enable it serve both national and county governments thus avoiding county governments setting up parallel structures,” said Cheserem. A Human Resource Audit conducted by the Transition Authority indicates that there are 103,578 government and defunct local Authority staff in the counties.

More than 32,208 workers belonging to defunct local authorities are still on the payroll. This is compared to 71,370 workers performing devolved functions. This situation has persisted even as recruitment of new county staff is still ongoing.

In a raft of policy recommendations to arrest the situation, the CRA recommends cleaning of the entire government payroll to remove all ghost workers by end of April 2014.

“There is also need to take necessary actions to eliminate known wastage of public resources. A lean task force to identify areas where waste can be eliminated in government departments should be set up in the Office of the President or the Deputy President,” Cheserem told The Standard.

He reckons that the Government also needs the spine to take firm action to stem corruption in the public service.

  This includes sacking and taking before a court of law those found to be engaging in corruption. The CRA has also recommended the need to rewrite and simplify all procurement laws and procedures.

This is because the current system seems to have been designed to be too complex, thereby encouraging corrupt practices.

“We need to restructure government to be lean and offer generous retirement packages to those civil servants who will not be retained,” said Cheserem.

Expanding wage bill

Interestingly, majority of counties are experiencing shortages in critical areas such as budget, planning, human resource and in specialised cadre such as doctors and engineers while others counties are over manned hence the need to rationalise and distribute existing staff.

Available figures from the Economic Survey and Salaries and Remuneration Commission indicate that the public wage bill is expanding at a higher rate — far way above the desired international standard of not more than 38 per cent recommended for Sub-Sahara Africa.

Kenya’s total public wage bill for the entire public service, including military and local authorities increased from Sh240.5 billion in 2008 to Sh457.5 billion in 2012. The wage bill as a percentage of GDP was 13.3 per cent in 2012 compared to 11.4 per cent in 2008/9.