Salaries team to blame for current mess in public sector

The vision and expectations of hardworking Kenyans at the time of the creation of the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) were high.

SRC was to set up to restructure, realign and create salary structures that would in turn enable creation of a lean and sustainable public wage bill for a country that had the most unequal remuneration structure in the world.

At the time of its creation, MPs were the highest and best paid.

However, the “local labourers” who contribute significantly to the creation of wealth in the country were the poorest in terms of remuneration.

The hope of Kenyans was that the commission would be mandated with doing meticulous job evaluation and validation so as to come up with salary structures that would decently pay the workers and public servants whose contributions are immense in the building of the country’s economy.

Yet when the SRC started to perform its function, it failed from the start. Job evaluation and validation was thrown to the bottom of the list of its priorities.

Instead, the commissioners sat long hours in their offices only to come up with salary structures meant to appease and please their employer (the Government and corrupt politicians).

The expectations of Kenyans were never to be realised.

Why would the SRC propose to pay an MP a whopping Sh540, 000 as a basic salary with other allowances and benefits excluded, for working for about three to five hours a day in a week of three days.

Some of the laws they enact are declared unconstitutional when scrutinised in courts.

Unfounded threats

However, the same commission proposed that a P1 teacher who works for eight hours a day for five days in a week, while striving to shape and transform the character of the future generation, is to be rewarded with a meagre basic salary of Sh18,000.

That a police constable who risks his/her life in Boni forest in Lamu to keep terrorists at bay in order to defend this beloved country is to be rewarded with a poor salary.

That is abusing the intelligence of the Kenyans.

Strikes by nurses, teachers, dock workers and the threatened civil servants strike in solidarity with the teachers, which threaten the very fabric of this nation, are indicative of our discontentment with the work of the SRC. This failure by the SRC, if not corrected, will surely plunge this beautiful nation into anarchy if not a civil revolution.

Simple basic law of physics state that for work to be done energy must be expended. I think it is awfully wrong for a whole commission that drew and continues to draw huge sums of money from public coffers, to assume that work can be done without energy being expended.

I think it is extremely painful to sustain a commission that has failed to do its job right just because of unfounded threats from the Legislature.

The best that could be done is to disband this commission and set up a new and powerful one to do its job right and quickly curtail the ballooning public wage bill.

That commission should borrow from developed countries where remuneration is done based on the time spent, energy expended and expertise involved.

Those are the principles that job evaluation and validation should be anchored on.