Re-organize the government to tame wage bill Ruto Told
Kenyans have urged President William Ruto to review the wage bill which is taking more than 40 percent of the country’s revenue.
In June this year, Kenya’s public wage bill crossed the half-a-trillion shilling mark at Ksh 520.03 billion according to Central Bank data.
In the last 10 years actually, our public wage bill has doubled.
The Jubilee administration inherited a wage bill of Ksh 274.4 billion from President Mwai Kibaki.
These numbers alone tell you that something needs to be done.
The high spending on civil servants’ wages, salaries and benefits and other recurrent expenditures such as pensions and the ballooning debt are putting a huge strain on the budget, leaving little room for expenditure on development projects to spur economic growth.
A developing country like ours faces difficult choices with limited resources while at the same time in dire need of expanding basic services like Healthcare and education to achieve Sustainable Development Goals.
President Ruto’s administration will need to tackle this head on and I’m glad he recently said when you find yourself in a hole, you need to stop digging.
One of the ways to tame the public wage bill is to reorganize the civil service to eliminate overstaffing, duplication of roles and functions, and ghost workers that we’re seeing at County levels being unearthed daily.
“Importantly in a post-Covid era, we need to introduce at government level employment flexibility which is working quite effectively in the private sector in response to demographic and technological advancements. We can now work from home and take advantage of Digital platforms to run the affairs of government. With a high number of Gen Zs, it is no longer exclusive that we should just have people sitting in offices,” Otiende said.
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