Civil servants reject retirement age cut to tame wage bill

By Faith Ronoh and Sophia Muthoni

Kenya: The Government should seek alternative ways of taming the ballooning wage bill instead of reducing the retirement age from 60 to the previous 55, the Union of Kenya Civil Servants (UKCS) has said.

This comes days after the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) released a report on possible ways of managing the runaway wage bill. One of the ways SRC recommended was the reduction of the retirement age by five years.

“Since most civil servants are within that age bracket and have already planned their financial lives, it will be unfair to change it at such a time,” said UKCS secretary-general Tom Odege.

Odege said government raised the retirement age to 60 in 2009 to ease the strain on pension bills. This, he said came after over 20,000 civil servants and teachers failed to get their pension after retirement, exposing the Government to a pension expenditure crisis.

“We also wanted to be at par with other East African countries who basically have their employees retiring within that same period,” said Odege.

To reduce the wage bill SRC also suggests that the Government encourages voluntary retirement.