Columnists

Why Serem term at SRC had mixed results

serem

Ms Sarah Serem. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Sarah Serem, who stepped down as chairperson of the Salaries Review Commission (SRC) recently having completed her term, was a very forceful and self-assertive public official.

Her tenure in office offers interesting insights on the impact of personality in the conduct of a public office.

By the sheer strength of personality, Ms Serem kept the profile of this important institution permanently high.

Yet when you look and evaluate her tenure carefully, the inescapable conclusion is that the SRC’s achievements give mixed results.

In a sense, one unintended impact of the SRC was an upsurge of strikes and industrial unrest in the public sector. Ms Serem expanded the mandate of the SRC beyond what it was meant to do.

The evidence are the numerous disputes she found herself engaged in as she sought to have a say in negotiations of Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) with unions representing civil servants.

In April 2014, she wrote to principal secretaries demanding that all CBAs be handed to her office before being signed. To the unions, she was a meddler always poking her nose and forcing her way into negotiations between the employer and workers’ representatives. Several unions took the SRC to court, accusing it of usurping the role of the Public Service Commission.

The Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Education and Allied Workers, which mostly represents non-academic staff at public universities filed a petition in court protesting meddling by the SRC in negotiations with their employer.

Other unions that had big tiffs with the SRC include the Kenya National Union of Nurses, the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union, and the Kenya National Union of Teachers.

Clearly, SRC has not served to promote industrial peace in the public sector.

The big mistake the framers of the SRC made was to assume that it was possible to separate the two critical functions of first -hiring workers as an employer, and second- assigning the functions of setting the terms of service and job evaluation to a totally different body.

We had reached a point where the SRC was even seeking to meddle into the setting of employment terms and conditions for employees of autonomous commercial State corporations. Some of them are listed entities competing for talent with the private sector and therefore have to pay market rate salaries.

In the case of parastatals, the SRC was meddling in the territory belonging to the State Corporations Advisory Committee based at the Office of the President.

Is it not the height of irony that the SRC has been trying to recommend terms and salaries for employees of entities such as Kenya Power, KenGen, Kenya Pipeline Corporation and Kenya Ports Authority?

If we don’t rethink the role of the SRC, we must brace ourselves for more industrial unrest in the public sector.

Ideally, SRC’s role should be confined to giving advice. The job of setting terms of service for public servants should be left to the specific employer - the Public Service Commission (PSC), the Teachers Service Commission , the Judicial Service Commission, the Parliamentary Service Commission- and in the case of parastatals- their boards and the State Corporations Advisory Committee.

This is not to say that the function of harmonisation of salaries across the public sector is not important.

Historically, the idea of having SRC came from the Kipkulei commission of inquiry into the harmonisation of terms and conditions of servive for public servants in 1999. At the time, the main concern was that parts of the public service were losing staff to others.

Within universities, academic staff were leaving to join other universities because the structure of remuneration was distorted.

To date, the Kipkulei Commission report is yet to be made public- its recommendations only implemented in a piecemeal manner.

The problem is that once an organisation has been created in the public sector in this country, it assumes a life of is own. We hardly reflect on the historical circumstances that led to its creation in the first place.

At Independence, the PSC which was a constitutionally independent body, with the responsibility of hiring and firing civil servants, was still firmly under the control of white civil servants. The regime of founding President, the late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, did not like it. That’s how the Department of Personnel Management (DPM) under the Office of the President came into being.

Why don’t we consider merging the SRC with DPM. The overlap of functions between some of these institutions is, to say the least, glaring.