Time obese government cut weight

It was not the intention of the framers of the Constitution to create 50 CAS positions to deputise 22 Cabinet Secretaries.” That was the clincher in the judgment delivered by the High Court on Monday.

Is it not an outrage that the political elite want to force the taxpayer to bear the burden of having to pay a monthly salary of Sh765,188 each to 50 individuals recruited to the ranks of public servants on the basis of no clear qualifications or skills other than the fact that the wielders of power want to accommodate and extend favours to their cronies who lost in the last elections?

The typical CAS will storm the office and immediately start demanding all manner of trappings of power, including huge red-carpeted offices, expensive four-wheel-drive fuel-guzzling vehicles and an opportunity to hire their relatives. They will demand a budget, clear responsibilities and staff. If we hire a whole 50 of them right now, the burden on taxpayer-funded wages will overwhelm us.

Let’s pray that Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah and the Law Society of Kenya, Katiba Institute or any other body in the public litigation space should now target another cadre of political appointees that has overpopulated the civil service: The so-called ‘advisers’.

Contracts

During the first term of former President Uhuru Kenyatta, a practice evolved whereby every CS was allowed to appoint two advisers. The jobs are not advertised and contracts are doled out to cronies under an arrangement known as ‘tenure by name’—meaning that you have to quit when the tenure of the CS who appointed you ends.

The system is all too familiar: Once you are appointed to the Cabinet, you just send two names to the Public Service Commission. The only check the PSC insists on is that the appointee is placed in a grade consonant with their qualifications.

These are senior positions, in the category of between Job Groups ‘R’ and ‘S’. Many career civil servants retire after working for 30 years without attaining these ranks.

The public service bureaucracy is this swamped with these private sector technocrats—individuals parachuted into the system to occupy high-profile positions, especially in the cadre of principal secretary (PS). In a good number of cases, the advisers are hired on special contracts known as ‘salary to self’ agreements that come complete with confidential clauses on the special terms.

Labour aristocracy

How did we end up creating this labour aristocracy in the civil service?

A friend who retired from the PSC a few years ago explained to me that the practice of hiring advisers for CSs and the President was adopted after the passage the 2010 Constitution, ostensibly because it was the practice in the presidential system of government.

Clearly, we have reached a point where we must accept that this experiment has not worked. The government has just become too big. In just over 10 years, the National Assembly has grown to nearly twice its former size.

On top of it, you have at least 47 senators, 47 governors and thousands of county assembly members, all on high salaries funded by the taxpayer. The county governments, too, are hiring executive members and boards on very high salaries.

The number of constitutional offices have proliferated order. Remember, to reduce the size of the civil service bureaucracy, the framers of our Constitution capped at 22 the number of ministries a new government can establish.

The political elite interpreted it as an attempt at limiting their powers to dispense patronage to their cronies. So, they decided to circumvent this provision by exploiting the law that allows the President to abolish and create state departments, which are all headed by PSs. Today, PSs are flowing out of our ears.

Politically polarised society

We must pray that somebody one day goes to court to test the constitutionality of this adviser position in the civil service, including at the county government level. And how many advisers is a governor entitled to appoint? Indeed, governors have been appointing advisers without regard to the burden to the taxpayer.

In the context of our politically polarised society, it does not surprise anyone that many interpret Monday’s court judgment in terms of whether or not the courts have delivered a political blow to President William Ruto’s administration. But I disagree, because the implications are much wider and far-reaching.

The judgment should be a wake-up call to us as a society to start interrogating the impact of proliferation of jobs and positions that are created on the basis of patronage on taxpayer-funded wages. The county governors are even bigger culprits.

That judgment is an opportunity to start debating how to restructure the public service by reducing the number of ministries and state departments into a lean structure and reorganising the bureaucracy around a few core functions.

 [email protected].