On June 5, 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta launched Remuneration and Benefits Policy and job evaluation exercise. The overall goal of the exercise is to “determine effective management of remuneration in this country”.
The Government wants the teaching fraternity to allow the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) to independently complete the job evaluation to inform remuneration in public service. However, unless the structural challenges related to employees’ engagement in public service are addressed, the exercise will not lead to any meaningful results.
The implementation of the 2010 Constitution required drastic reorganisation of Government ministries, particularly that of reducing the ministries to a maximum of 22. The Constitution also prescribes a two-tier system of governance, that is, the country and national government. These constitutional changes have had significant impact on human resources mobilisation and engagement.
The drafters of Constitution were alive to this reality and recommended formation of Transition Authority (TA), as an independent outfit, to oversee the process of employees’ engagement, transfer and recruiting.
Unfortunately, the post-election volatile political environment intimidated the TA and reduced its effectiveness in instilling soberness in public service. Further, the county executive violated the Constitution and recruited new employees against the TA advice.
We have 19 ministries that have no consistent structures in terms of how employees are engaged in line with individual skills, competences and seniority. Units and departments were hurriedly merged and others set up without due consideration to ministries’ mandate, functions and optimal capacity.
The public service in counties is a mirror image of biblical House of Babel. The counties have a mixture of staff, namely, former local authorities’ employees, devolved and county-hired staff and these groups of staff are on different terms of service.
Most of the work is assigned to recently hired staff that largely lack requisite skills. The rest of the staff, except for health personnel, are sidelined and often threatened with sacking. They therefore keep off the activities of countries and only occasionally report to offices.
Subsequently, public service delivery is wanting and revenue collection has been declining. With no proper enforcement mechanism of raising and collecting revenue, and no structures to rationalise public expenditure, corruption is rife in counties.
It is therefore likely that county governments will not co-operate with the SRC to undertake the job evaluation exercise for fear of unearthing what has been happening.
As a way forward, three things should be done before the job evaluation exercise is undertaken. First, Public Service Commission (PSC), county service boards and the SRC should restructure the ministries departments in line with their mandates and functions and deploy the current employees in appropriate units as per skills and competences.
Secondly, counties should synchronise existing systems in use, particularly adopting the revenue generation and expenditures systems that were effectively being used by former local authorities, even as they embrace IFMIS which poses various implementation challenges.
Finally, PSC and county service boards should undertake job rationalisation at county level and harmonise terms of service of employees to improve morale.
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