The ‘sacrificing’ public servant is an old Kenyan myth  

Two Members of Parliament scored “own goals” recently when they mistimed their call for the legislature to reverse the wage reduction they “suffered” at the conclusion of the last parliamentary term.

Without exception, Kenyans responded to this call for higher wages with characteristic anger and name calling of Parliament as a whole.  

These discussions are informed by two claims that are completely wrong on their own and which contradict each other.

The first claim is that individuals who work for public service should not be seeking personal enrichment.

This curious reasoning is based on the idea that people who serve the public starting from legislators, commissioners, the president, cabinet secretaries and the other arms of government make a sacrifice to do so.

Thus the common argument directed at the MPs at the forefront of the charge to raise their wages was that if they wanted to be wealthy, then they ought to gone to work in the private sector.

The nature of public sector outlays in Kenya tells clearly that most workers in the public service receive a large wage premium.

For that reason alone, we must not discuss remuneration of public sector workers with the false assumption that these people are not driven by economic incentives.

That is delusional and depicts parliamentarians as unduly driven by economic incentives, unlike their colleagues in the Presidency, the Treasury, the judicial service or the variety of commissions and task forces that are a gravy train for many professionals.

No respectable theory of economics shows that working within the public sector is supposed to make individual less conscious of monetary rewards.

Consider the cluster of people holding only dubiously acquired diplomas or certificates from third rung communications schools, and who sign letters on government note pads with titles such as Director of Communications Department, or Strategy.

I have read material written by these individuals in both formal and informal settings and know that they would not be in the front office of any serious private sector firm that needs to attract clients that pay for value.

SNAKE OIL SOLUTIONS

This situation demonstrates that the state is so highly politicised that the public service values crass political loyalty and dependability and pays some barely literate people impressive wages and allowances.     

The Constitution of Kenya correctly established the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) to formulate and advise on public sector wage policy. While the SRC is well-meaning, it has succumbed to the dubious argument that public sector wages ought to be benchmarked against those in the private sector.

Hence the fumbling that generated that expensive but futile activity in the name of job evaluations, resulting in lucrative contracts for consultants whose recommendations are contested throughout the public sector.

Among the preposterous assumptions that informed these job evaluations was the quest to determine a formula for evaluating a job and then derive compensation for that task.

These reports contained a lot of mumbo-jumbo and I found them replete with bogus quantification.

It's clear that compensation within the public sector should be based on the level of taxes that Kenyans wish to bear, not on the snake oil solutions sprinkled around by human resource consultants.

The barometer of public opinion shows that Kenyans are unwilling to bear large taxes for legislators’ wages. If the question were asked for all other offices too, it may well be that Kenyans would not tolerate the structure of the public sector that exists.

'AN EXPENSIVE JOKE'

SRC, therefore, ought to understand that its function is partly to convince the taxpayer that there’s no magic except to consider tax levels in setting public sector wages. That is definitely a more difficult proposition than appointing firms whose reports make superfluous statements and charge millions of dollars for snake oil.

Remember that these firms know the SRC is itself run by commissioners many of whom must depend on the recommendations to set their own wages. Can you see now why the claim that people who work in public sector bear no economic motivation is mistaken?

The bigger lesson is that while legislators were wrong to try and raise their own wages, they were right to place that discourse in the public domain. Ultimately, the decision about how much tax to pay for the wages of all public servants is a political question.

Those consultants earning big money to send reports to the SRC just told us all an expensive joke. Taxpayers are all alone because the state is already very large, and the only way to balance payments between workers is by reducing the amounts lost to corruption and ensuring that government doesn’t buy from snake oil salesmen.

Excoriating legislators alone is not useful.

Kwame Owino is the chief executive officer of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA-Kenya), a public policy think tank based in Nairobi. Twitter: @IEAKwame