Public wage bill has risen by nearly 50 per cent (or Sh90 billion) in the first nine months of the fiscal year.
Kenya is already a highly indebted country that urgently needs to control public spending — not expand it.
The country needs to urgently curb its public spending to regain traction on a more sustainable development path.
Judging by the latest official data, it seems there has been no respite in the ballooning of the public wage bill despite years of talk.
The Controller of Budget says in latest report that the national government’s wage bill has risen by nearly 50 per cent (or Sh90 billion) in the first nine months of the fiscal year following a series of increments for various categories of public servants.
For a country that is struggling with huge public spending obligations and an ever-widening budget deficit, this is quite a gloomy message.
It does not help that Kenya is already a highly indebted country that urgently needs to control public spending — not expand it.
In recent months, teachers, lecturers and the police, among others, have received generous pay packages that have pushed spending on remuneration even higher during the nine months to March 2017.
Fact is that the government has recently found itself in a weak position when it comes to collective bargaining in the face of a looming General Election.
Trade unions have easily capitalised on the political season to arm-twist, at times even blackmail, employers into awarding them hefty pay increments.
But given the wave of recent pay increment awards after initial resistance, it may very well be that the State was resisting workers’ demands for higher pay all along in order to yield and score political points only months to the poll. It is not to be forgotten that after three years, the government finally gave the lowest paid workers an 18 per cent increase in their salaries on Labour Day.
The bottom-line however is that Kenya needs to urgently curb its public spending to regain traction on a more sustainable development path.
It is discouraging that that even MPs, who have the final say on government fiscal affairs, have been involved in reckless spending of taxpayer funds through unnecessary travel expenses as revealed in the same report.
For Kenya to carry out development projects, spending huge amounts on paying workers even when productivity has not improved should end. Policy makers – including MPs, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, the National Treasury – to put a stop to it.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
