NAIROBI, Kenya May 17- Cabinet Secretary for Public Service and Delivery Moses Kuria has made good his threat to convert all public service jobs from permanent to contracts.
According to the Cabinet Secretary, the taskforce will be gazetted to implement the proposal.
He reiterated the radical move is aimed at enhancing productivity and reduce the wage bill.
He stated that it will also seek to reinforce austerity measures by President William Ruto’s administration.
He observed that it was untenable for the workforce in the public service to be allocated Sh1 trillion in recurrent expenditure out of the Sh2 trillion collected as tax.
“It’s not sustainable and I don’t see it as an economic issue for me it’s a moral issue how can one million people take half of the resources and then leave Sh53 million others to scramble for one trillion,” Kuria said.
CS Kuria emphasized the laxity trend and absenteeism in the public service sector must be enforced saying he will present the list of task force members’ approval to Cabinet to kick start the process.
“I will be gazetting a task force to look on these issues in terms of modalities and to carry out public participation. We are not a dictatorial country, this policy direction,” he said.
“We are in charge of performance and we have a huge problem because we have people who work for one hour a day, other work for two hours like doctors in public hospitals. The only time you find full attendance is when they are going out of town,” CS Kuria added.
He emphasized that the termination of all permanent contracts in the public service will enhance a culture of productivity that will propel service delivery to the taxpayers.
“When you go and tell people ‘you produce and tell them please deliver this they tell you, where will you take me? We have seen cabinet secretaries come and go. It makes it so difficult to enforce a culture of productivity,” Kuria said.
CS Kuria said the contract policy framework in the public sector is bound to work as it has been benchmarked in other countries including the United States and the United Kingdom.
“We are moving to contract and pensionable so that we can create a framework that will have our pension which will build on our savings,” CS Kuria stated.
President William Ruto is confident that the public sector wage bill can be reduced to 35 percent by 2027.
The Public Finance Management Regulations (2015) envisaged achievement of a wage bill of not more than 35 percent of revenue, and a wage bill to GDP of not more than 7.5 percent from a longstanding estimate of 7.9 percent in line with the average for developing countries.
Last month, the government suspended the review of salaries and allowances of all public officers indefinitely due to what it termed as hard economic times.
