Kenyans’ outcry against high public salaries is a bark up the wrong tree

Kenyans are up in arms over what they see as outrageous expenditure on the public sector pay. There have been demonstrations, most colourfully and famously against MPs (complete with pig blood sprinkled in front of Parliament).

President Uhuru Kenyatta agrees, and a few days ago announced that drastic action would be taken. He offered to take a pay-cut to demonstrate his seriousness.

In addition, there is now a sense that corruption has got out of hand in the year-old Jubilee Government.

The salaries of big men and women tend to be an emotional and catchy issue for the public, but I have never believed that high public pay is a big problem.

At the very basic level, we are all hypocritical and self-serving when it comes to pay. We tend to think that we deserve big salaries, but the rest of the people don’t.

Apart from corruption, the bigger problem with pay in Kenya today is that the people earning those big cheques are not giving us value for money in return.

For example, those potholes in Nairobi that went away during the presidency of the good old Mwai Kibaki, are back. I am reminded of them every day when I hit the entrance to Kimathi Street.

So the real demand should be for service delivery, and less energy should be invested in denouncing the size of public officials’ pay slips. The South Africans have taken that route.

Secondly, and most importantly, to deal with the problem of the public wage, we need to understand the source of the problem. It is most definitely not greed.

For that we need to go nearly 30 years back when the wave of political, economic, and market liberalisation and reforms started to sweep the continent.

DISTRIBUTOR OF WEALTH

We liberalised our economies, privatised state-owned companies, ended foreign exchange controls, and so on. Soon, stock exchanges were being established, and existing ones like Nairobi’s, booming.

A lot of new wealth was created. However, we learnt that while liberalisation was good at creating wealth, it was not a fair distributor of that wealth.

So the wealth became concentrated in a few hands, while the rest of the people were, to use a popular Ugandan expression, left “grassing”.

Along with economic liberalisation, came political opening. One-party rule ended, and in came a second era of multiparty politics and regular elections. Multipartyism did not necessarily usher in a fresh age of democracy.

Incumbents, for example, steal most elections in Africa. But whether elections were free or not, winning office became more expensive. In the 1970s and most of the 1980s, an African president didn’t have to advertise during elections.

Today, because of the liberalisation of the media market, and the fact that soaps, reality shows, and football are competing for voters’ attention, a politician has to fight a hundred times harder to put his image before the voter.

The liberalisation of the economy and its unequal outcomes, and competitive politics, came together in strange ways. Governments felt the need to create new bodies which deliver services the private sector couldn't, partly to prevent voter revolt.

NEW PATRONAGE AVENUES

Since they couldn’t grow traditional government, they did it through creating executive quasi-government agencies.

In came revenue authorities, urban road authorities, rural road authorities, salary commissions, water boards, benefits authorities, civil aviation authorities – the list is endless. Devolution was also a way of managing this problem.

In addition, because politics was now more competitive, presidents needed new patronage avenues to keep their key supporters happy so they could pitch in at the next election. So they got the juicy jobs in mushrooming executive agencies.

All these forces led to what cleverer people than your columnist call “state capture” by that small group of fellows who grew rich and from the 1980s and 1990s (and early 2000) reforms, whose money is now more essential than ever for any politician who wants to come to power.

But because not all of them could become CEOs of executive agencies, other avenues like inflated tenders were availed to them. You can see why a pay-cut can only go so far in solving this problem.

Only more political and economic reform will change things. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen overnight.

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