Treasury rules out public service job cuts in U-turn

The U-turn comes at a time when Kenya’s public service workforce hit 1.05 million in June, gobbling up Sh1.25 trillion in salaries and allowances for the 2024/25 fiscal year, just about half of the Sh2.57 trillion taxes collected during the year.

But the Treasury now says that rather than fire employees, the government is rolling out a new human resource management information system that is expected to weed out ghost workers and seal other leakages in the public wage bill system, with all national government entities planned to onboard before the end of this month.

“With the new human resource management information system that we are putting in place, we are going to manage the wage bill at least at the rate at which it is today because I don't see the government having a strategy of or bringing retrenchment as a strategy,” Treasury Cabinet Secretary (CS) John Mbadi said in an interview.

He added that the government walked back on the earlier promise “because already we are having so many unemployed Kenyans.”
The government is integrating current fragmented payrolls across different national government entities and in the counties into one system, aiming to flush out malpractices such as the existence of ghost workers.

By eliminating ghost workers, the Treasury says, the government saves billions of shillings that have long been wasted on unproductive expenditures.

“Just by the Ministry of Education using a system to check on capitation, it has led to reports that I've got Sh4 billion savings on capitalisation. This is an example of the savings we are looking at,” the CS said.

During the national wage bill conference held in April last year, however, the government had indicated that it would target thousands of support staff, casual workers and persons with fake academic certificates in a mass layoff planned to clean up the public service and lower the wage bill.

The government said this while revealing that support staff constituted two-thirds of public service workers, yet the requirement is a composition of 70 percent technical staff and 30 percent support staff.

This means that of the 1.05 million public service workers, support staff are estimated at around 702,950, more than double their required number.

“The composition of the establishment itself is problematic in that it is seriously skewed towards support staff at the expense of technical and other core-function staff. Clearly, 83 percent of state departments have violated the recommended ratio of technical staff to support services,” President William Ruto said.

The President spoke after his Public service CS at the time, Moses Kuria, warned that the ministry was partnering with the Head of Public Service to undertake a major shakeup in the public service that would end up in “cutting this public service.”

The Treasury, however, admitted that it has faced resistance within government even in its efforts to roll out the new human resource system from parties who have been against the transition.

It said the plan is to integrate all national government entities into the new system by December 31, 2025, and that all the counties would be on board by the end of June 2026.

“We can make our public sector more efficient and manage our payroll so that we eliminate ghost workers in our payroll and that is why we are integrating the payroll now, with the resistance of course from some quarters but they are not going to succeed,” CS Mbadi said.

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