Government job cuts loom as vetting team is formed

Civil servants are bracing for possible layoffs after the Government formed a committee to determine how many civil servants are needed in various ministries and departments.

The team, expected to complete the task by November, includes officials from the Ministry of Devolution and Planning, Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC), Transition Authority (TA), Public Service Commission (PSC), Union of Kenya Civil Servants (UKCS) and the Council of Governors.

The evaluation process, which will involve the use of biometric identification, is expected to take four months and will set the stage for staff redeployment, transfers and elimination of ghost workers.

When completed, it is expected to trim the bloated public wage bill which stands at more than Sh500 billion a year.

“We have agreed to undertake a joint capacity assessment and rationalisation programme for both national and county public service,” said Devolution and Planning secretary Anne Waiguru at a media briefing in Nairobi on Monday.

“The objective of the programme is to undertake strategic reviews of the organisational structures, functions and staffing of the national and county public service against their respective mandates.”

The study will include human resource and skills audit to establish gaps and excesses alongside assessment of staff competencies.

Ms Waiguru, who chairs the Inter-Governmental Steering Committee (IGSC), warned non-performing civil servants that the audit would expose them and possibly lead to their sacking. The IGSC is tasked with ensuring equitable deployment of civil servants to counties and national governments.

Ms Waiguru said that the mandate of the joint committee has been institutionalised following the gazettement of its secretariat. Members include the chairpersons of PSC (Margaret Kobia), SRC (Sarah Serem) and TA (Kinuthia Wamwangi).

Others are UKCS secretary-general Tom Odege and James Ongwae, the Council of Governors’s human resource and social welfare committee chairman. According to PSC, there are 700,000 government workers.

The huge wage bill has been cited as one of the factors slowing down the country’s development agenda since the bulk of public revenues goes towards employees’ pay at the expense of development projects.

READ: Civil service job cuts to start in March, says PSC

This is what prompted President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, to announce in March that they would take a 20 per cent pay cut each, while ministers and heads of State corporations were expected to take a 10 per cent salary cut.

PSC boss, Prof Kobia, who is in charge of hiring, redeploying and sacking public servants, said the exercise would provide a clear picture of the exact number of staff needed at any given time.

“The rationalisation will enable us to find out who requires to be redeployed and which skills are required in various counties for equal distribution.”

“We are hoping we would have done the rationalisation by November,” she said, adding that it would take another six months to implement the results of the study.

Already, the SRC, which decides the remuneration of public workers, is conducting a job evaluation exercise with a view to fixing pay in line with staff performance and qualification. This is besides government plans to place all State employees in Job Group U and above on contracts.

Prof Kobia said that State employees whose offices were scrapped following the merger of ministries would also be redeployed.

The exercise will see a number of staff moved to other departments, ministries and counties where there is shortage of manpower while those whose services are considered non-essential will be sacked.

However, the government will set up a mechanism to compensate those affected.

“There will be a redress mechanism. In the event that the decisions taken by these steering and technical committees aggrieve any individual in the public service, there will be a mechanism for addressing those grievances,” said Ms Waiguru.