Economy

More than half of civil servants earn below Sh30,000

LABOUR

Workers during this year’s Labour Day celebrations at Uhuru Park in Nairobi. PHOTO | FILE

Slightly more than two per cent of civil servants earn more than Sh100,000 monthly, highlighting the pay inequality in the public service.

Data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics shows that 9,800 government workers or 2.18 per cent of 182,000 employed directly by ministries earn above Sh100,000.

More than half or 55 per cent of the direct government employees or 100,739 earn less than Sh30,000.

Top civil servants, including principal secretaries and directors, earn salaries equivalent to those paid to corporate executives.

Though the government has also increased the pay of the thousands of unionisable civil servants, their pay has not kept pace with that of their bosses, leading to a huge disparity between the salaries of these workers and the top earners.

This has invited the wrath of the Union of Kenya Civil Servants (UKCS) and call for action from the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).

About 10.81 per cent of the civil servants earn between Sh50,000 and Sh99,000 while 16.77 per cent of them have a gross pay of less than Sh20,000.

It’s not clear whether the pay scales include a raft of allowances paid to public servants that have the effect of nearly doubling their pay.

State think-tank Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (Kippra) recommends capping of allowances to account for between 10 and 25 per cent of their gross pay.

READ: Revealed: Number of Kenyans earning over Sh100,000

About 38.6 per cent of the civil servants earn less than Sh30,000 while 10.8 per cent of them earn between Sh50,000 and Sh99,999.

The number of ministry staff earning more than Sh50,000 dropped to 23,527 last year from 28,506 the previous year, possibly due to retirement.

The pay disparities captured in the KNBS report tally with another by the SRC that raised the red flag over wage gaps in government.

The Commission is now conducting a job evaluation to reduce the gaps.

“We benchmarked remuneration levels of comparable countries including Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, Canada, UK and USA. We established that the wage differential between the highest and the lowest paid in Kenya is highest at 169 per cent compared to Canada which is the lowest at 7.9 per cent,” Sarah Serem, the SRC chairperson, said earlier.

Rwanda has a differential of 72.2 per cent, while South Africa is at eight per cent. The SRC says the proposed pay structure would reduce the wage differential from 169 to 82 per cent.