Rid the public sector of staff with fake papers
The ballooning public service wage bill presents a huge challenge to the government, which is struggling to meet this and its other financial obligations.
The government’s total workforce, which is estimated at 960,000 public servants, gobbles up almost half of the revenue collected from the 50 million Kenyans.
Last year, for instance, the public sector wage bill of Sh1.1 trillion accounted for 48.6 per cent of the Sh2.36 trillion collected by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).
As the government reels under this heavy burden, President William Ruto says there are some 2,000 people working in the public service employed on the strength of fake academic certificates. They thus earn underserved salaries and allowances.
The President has since directed the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and the Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DCI) to move quickly and arraign the culprits in order to recover some of the funds spent on the unsustainable wage bill. The shedding of this load is a necessity.
After all, the unqualified people who have been allowed to hold jobs and get paid but do not give any value to the public service.
But Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua estimates at 10,000 the number of people working in the government without proper papers and who should immediately face the sack. By getting rid of them, he is convinced, it will be possible to recover anywhere between Sh1 billion and Sh2 billion.
As it grapples with its huge wage bill, the government is targeting those people with fake certificates for removal as they have no business being there in the first place.
A forensic audit of academic certificates in the public service is long overdue. The academic cheats should be quickly exposed, promptly sacked and the money they fraudulently earned in the undeserved positions recovered.
But this is not peculiar to the public sector. Such crooks also manage to weave their way into private companies and institutions. There is a need for a national audit of academic certificates to weed out the fakes and ensure that merit prevails in the private and public sector recruitment of employees.
