Participants during the Third National Wage Bill Conference at the Bomas of Kenya on April 17, 2024.
Thousands of support staff who constitute more than two-thirds of the 960,000 public service workforce, casual workers and public servants with fake academic certificates will be the first casualties as the government moves to address the ballooning public wage bill.
This emerged on Wednesday as the 2024 National Wage Bill Conference was concluded, with a raft of resolutions that could shake Kenya’s entire public service, if implemented.
Among key resolutions made following the three-day conference was that all agencies in national and county governments should review their staff establishments to ensure the legally required match of skill sets.
Public service entities are required to have 70 per cent technical staff and 30 per cent support staff, but in its current composition, the service has more support staff than technical staff.
“The composition of the establishment itself is problematic in that it is seriously skewed towards support staff at the expense of technical and other core staff. Clearly, 83 per cent of state departments have violated the recommended ratio of technical staff to support services,” said President William Ruto.
The President also noted that the proliferation of public servants with fake certificates had not only contributed to the worsening of services offered due to their lack of skills but also added to the high wage bill that is now unsustainable.
Dr Ruto tasked the Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to apprehend culprits holding fake academic certificates, viewing this as a quick win for shedding an unnecessary load on the wage bill.
Fake certificates
“The 2,100 identified people earning government wages and salaries with fake certificates should just return the money we paid them. Otherwise, EACC and DCI must move with speed to recover public resources that were spent,” President Ruto said.
Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua claimed that up to 10,000 public servants could be working in government backed by fake certificates.
“If we make a decision to get rid of all the fellows and characters with fake certificates, probably we could knock out 10,000 people from the payroll and recover Sh1 billion or Sh2 billion. Many people in government, some governors, some heads of departments, some sitting with you (President Ruto) here, have fake papers. You have to make a decision,” Mr Gachagua said.
While the crackdown on holders of fake certificates could net thousands of public servants after an audit revealed that more than 2,000 within a section of the public service had fake certificates, it would be the review of staff establishments that would seriously shake the government, should the threat to cut off fluff and leave the service with a match of 70 per cent technical staff against 30 per cent support staff be enforced.
The conference also resolved that all counties and national government agencies must by June 30, 2024, present action plans on how they will cut money they are spending on salaries and allowances within the required 35 per cent as a share of revenues by June 2028, and shift from measuring activities and inputs to measuring outputs.
Stand-alone payroll systems
“All institutions at both levels of government to migrate their payrolls to the Human Resource Information System- Kenya by June 2025. Further, manual, multiple, and stand-alone payroll systems to cease,” Salaries and Remuneration Commission chairperson Lyn Mengich said.
Ms Mengich noted that among the must-dos for the public service to cut the wage bill, which is currently eating into almost half (Sh1.1trillion) of the taxes the government collects, public institutions at both levels of government must re-look at their establishments.
“We must re-look at our staff establishments. There is a lot of wastage of public resources. If we can manage the resources we have well, we might not have a wage bill problem,” she said.
The conference was held from Monday, April 15, and brought together close to 3,000 delegates from both levels of government, civil society, and players in the private sector.
The main aim was devising strategies to lower Kenya’s public wage bill, which at Sh1.1 trillion consumed 46.6 percent of the Sh2.26 trillion taxes collected by the Kenya Revenue Authority in the year ending June 2023, progressively back to 35 per cent of the taxes.
The public service continues to bleed more than Sh1trillion from government revenues annually, despite working on a capacity of about two-thirds, and players note that deploying full capacity would raise it to about Sh1.8 trillion.
But the service has also been filled with cases of overlaps and duplication of mandates among state corporations, and national and county governments, which have seen different people paid to render the same service.
“We need to finalise and transfer the costing of all the functions that have been devolved as well as their attendant resources,” said Council of Governors (CoG) Chairperson Anne Waiguru.
The payment of salaries outside the government’s Integrated Personnel and Payroll Database (IPPD) has also been cited as a big problem for national and county governments, with counties spending about Sh130 billion on manual payrolls between 2016 and 2019 alone.
Former Chief Justice David Maraga noted that irregular hiring of staff remains rife in the civil service, hurting performance and burdening taxpayers.
“The failure to punish such vices breeds a culture of impunity and emboldens officeholders at all levels of government to do as they please,” Mr Maraga said.
Public Service Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria said that there are close to a million public servants getting about half (46.6 percent) of taxes collected from more than 50 million Kenyans, and leaving just about half of the taxes for the remaining population.
“I will move to Cabinet to seek approval that all staff establishments as currently approved remain suspended until a review is done to establish whether those establishments make sense or not,” Mr Kuria said.
