PRESS STATEMENT ON WAGE BILL ***************************** We are totally dismayed by the knee-jerk moves by the president to treat the symptoms instead of the disease in the current prevailing debate of the soaring WAGE BILL. More interesting was his Greek gift— the so called National Dialogue on Public wage bill, a fool’s errand which ended up defeating the very purpose it was called for. We all know the problem and both the president and his jubilee government must stop looking for its lost needle in the wrong places—the obscene opulence exhibited by bureaucrats and politically corrects individuals in the jubilee government in mind numbing. Why for instance should cabinet and principle secretaries still ride on landcruisers complete with convoys in the middle of Nairobi? Are the city roads that bad, what happened to the earlier government directive on vehicles more than 3000cc which birthed the ubiquitous passats, are roads within the city in a quarry condition to merit 4X4 vehicles? Interesting is this nauseating specter of so called cabinet secretaries exit their offices for meeting or conferences at safaripark et al using the ultra modern Thika road super highway yet ridding on 4X4 vehicles with bodyguards and aides in tow, is thika road a muram or rural road? All these are totally unacceptable and the president must stop engaging Kenyans in a moth dance on this very contentious issue. Heretofore, Jubilee seems to be on a race to outdo Imelda Marcos, Jose Astrada, and Mobutu Seseko, Bedel Bokasa, Obiang Nguema, Agustinho Pinochet, Hosni Mubarak, Khadafi or even Baby Doc of Haiti in sucking the state coffers dry. The burden of all this mayhem is the cross the overburdened tax payer have to carry, the runway cost of living and the many other faculties of development the government has t forgo to meet the soaring wage bill resulted by this obnoxious spending on salaries to maintain the bloated system. In Rwanda, we all know what happens. Ministers ride on low end vehicles whilst the president rides on a 4 vehicle convoy--because leadership is pegged on the maxim of service to the people. In Netherlands a donor country far richer than Kenya, ministers opt to ride in bicycles, not to mention other superior economies like Brazil, Turkey. In Senegal, the parliament even voted to scrap the senate and the vice president position in 2012 just to save the tax payer. Today we have many tangential posts which we can do without. We therefore recommend that; 1. The president must be honest in his corruption onslaught since this is one of the seepages the country loses lots of money-he must lead from the front in fighting his untold scourge if possible go the Chinese way. On top, the president must not just chop-off his salary that was too cosmetic he must reduce his allowances and state house budgetary allocations too which makes a serious joke of the later. An example is his trip to Mt Kenya safari lodge where he spent a night at a presidential suite costing Ksh.500,000 meaning a 4 day night was about Ksh2,000,000, presume William Ruto too joined him in a similar suite hence the whole pay cut becomes the sickest joke north of Limpopo. 2. The many benchmarking trips by civil servants must also end. Let them embrace technology and deploy other learning means than those many trips that bleed the public coffers yet their results can’t be quantified. 3. At this trying times, desperate calls merit desperate measures…in Malawi president Joyce Banda sold her presidential jet to rescue the country from the brink of collapse, why can’t the country sell the Vice President official residence, after all William Ruto was not an IDP yet again vice presidents world over have been operating from their offices and private homes. 4. The government must take seriously through public service commission the issue of ghost workers and work overnight to name, expose, and shame and even prosecute fiends fueling this evil. It is time to catch these black goats by the day before the night darkness camouflages them. 5. We want a public inquiry on the any hyper inflated tenders in public service; case in point is the standard gauge railway among others. Besides all these tenders in both national and county governments must be probed by PPOA, PAC, EACC among others to give them a clean bill of health before commencement. 6. The Uwezo fund be given to youths as a grant to enable them take off their various enterprises from which thereafter they may apply for loans in various commercial banks on the basis of their business net worth or performance. Otherwise as it stands, the Jubilee government is in a spirited effort chasing the winds, this will hit the dead ends like the women enterprise fund under Kibaki and other white elephants that today dot every space within our borders—thanks to lack of foresight, non committed leadership built on expediency than substance. Until these among others are done, we will continue assuming that the president and his jubilee government are reading from the notes of Abunwasi. Either way the president must reduce his allowances with over 60%, if not now then right now. We demand transparency, we demand an end to this long convoys by elected, appointed state officers and it is also time we opened a national dialogue on some aspects of the constitution which is stratospherically driving the wage bill to a height we may soon fail to arrest. From the secretariat, TEAM BABA ONLINE FORCE.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 13:40:50 +0000
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