This ‘mali ya umma’ mentality, if unchecked, will spell disaster for us

It doesn’t matter if Ababu Namwamba is grandstanding.

That is beside the point. What is important is that the matter of obscenely overpaid public officers he raises must be confronted head-on sooner or later. There are no two ways about it.

The Speaker of the National Assembly and other MPs have ridiculed the Budalang’i MP’s motion to slash the salaries of the public sector elite by half.

They have dismissed it as populist. On Wednesday, when the motion comes up for debate, it will be thrown out. That is for sure. Yet the issue will not go away. Not yet.

It is quite true that ad-hoc cuts confined to the super-salaried elite will not reduce the enormous public sector wage bill too significantly.

THE FIRST STEP

Nor, of course, will they yield enough to pay what teachers are asking for. Ultimately what must be done is to comprehensively slim down the national and county governments.

There are whole departments and agencies that should be slashed, others retrenched. That will require changes to the constitution and all that the process entails.

We must start somewhere nonetheless, and that is the spirit in which we should look at Mr Namwamba’s effort. What he is doing is to simply get this critical conversation going.

For starters, the MPs, rather than just convene on Wednesday to call Mr Namwamba names, should approach the matter more constructively.

It is true that, contrary to popular myth, they failed to bulldoze the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) when they wanted to raise their salaries the last time the two had a showdown.

PUBLIC PROPERTY

But the elected chaps are smart. They proceeded to pad their allowances – sitting, travel and mileage – in such a way that their gross pay approaches and sometimes exceeds Sh1 million.

That’s why there is always a catfight for membership of parliamentary committees. That is why you see so many seminars being arranged in Mombasa and wherever. Mileage claims are especially abused.

The madness cuts across the public sector – the civil service, the judiciary, parastatals. Mali ya umma is the reigning mentality. I have no idea why Kenya Airways is broke.

Our public sector leaders would win hands down any frequent-flier competition. Even the President has caught on to this craze with his large delegations to nowhere.

The SRC should take a hefty pay cut itself, if not getting abolished altogether with the other constitutional commissions. It is butting into the teachers’ matter where it really had no role in the first place.

The contentious salaries were negotiated by the Teachers’ Service Commission and the Kenya National Union of Teachers.

SRC'S RELEVANCE
I am not sure we even need this SRC. It has contracted its mandate to PriceWaterhouseCoopers. They are the ones currently working on rationalising job groups and pay scales across the civil service.

First, they are concentrating on the constitutional commissions. Eventually they will go down to the county governments. The report comes out in March next year.

Talking of county governments, this is where the biggest wastage of public funds is happening. Talk of “non-carcinogenic” wheelbarrows that cost more than Sh100,000 each, Obama grass that never grows, and endless “bench-marking” trips to the ends of the earth.

The shocking thing is that this extravagant and totally unnecessary travel is something the Auditor-General cannot do anything about. So what is his use?

A hilarious comment came from an Elgeyo-Marakwet MCA after a junket to the All Africa Games in Brazzaville this month. “Even if we go to Mars and we have accounted for it, it’s ok,” he boasted on national TV. Mali ya umma.