#WAGEBILLCRISIS:Any government officer will tell you that salaries for civil servants are NOT the problem... and I dare say it is also NOT in the big time tenders such as roads and equipment because these kinds ofexpenses are budgeted for way in advance and the scrutiny for such procurement is elaborate (any pilferage at this level takes seriouscooking of deals by very senior and influential government operatives and requires no-nonsense political will to handle... so this I leave to the President).The animal we need to deal with is REDUNDANCY, ALLOWANCES and this thing called OPERATIONS.REDUNDANCY:Kibakiss government had 40 something ministries. Most of these were fully staffed with Directors, H.R and Admin officers,Procurement officers, accountants, secretaries e.t.c and for some like agriculture, forestry,wildlife, fisheries, health, medical services, they had staff even in thedistricts. Then came Uhuru and the ministries were condensed to 18 combining certain mandates under one umbrella. Now, the topis lean but where did the secretaries go? drivers? accountants? procurement officers? directors? District officials? You catch the drift? Go round and you will find secretaries in empty officestelling stories all day as they have no work to do. What work is being done at the former Nairobi Metropolitan office at KICC??? I always find some people there on my occasional visit to a certain office. ccCarren Kiki KimkungALLOWANCES:I need not belabor this point. Some of the allowances currently paid out especially in bunge do not make any sense. For example the sitting allowances for the normal parliamentary session. I dont understand it. I understand the mileage allowance and the committee allowance lakini hiyo ya normal session I need to be explained for slowly. Other allowances that can be avoided are the site-seeing international visits by our MCAs. Every time any of them go out, they are paid huge allowances and I am yet to see any life changing value they have brought back from these foreign trips.OPERATIONS:Like the DP said yesterday on citizen, we dont need all those mandazis, flowers and protocol ingovernment offices. How many adverts are we seeing in each of the newspapers everyday by Parastatals, County governments, Ministries, Commissions and other government agencies? Ive done a quick calculation based on an assumed combined 10 full page adverts everyday in at least three papers at Kshs.250,00 each and I got Kshs.2.5Billionper year. We can save all this money by having all these adverts online and then carrying 2 or three lines in a special government classified page e.g.1. MACHAKOS COUNTY: TENDER ADVERT, 12TH MARCH 2014 -WWW.MACHAKOSCOUNTY.GO.KE/tenders/roadmaintenance/machakostown2.MINISTRY OF LANDS: EXPRESSION OF INTEREST 12TH MARCH 2014 -WWW.LANDSKENYA.GO.KE/customersatisfactionsurvey... andso on and so forth.Let me conclude by saying that scrapping devolved units is not a solution. There is a reason Kenyans wanted devolution. What we need to do is reduce the bureaucracy we created down there with countless offices. We dont need a referendum for this because other than the County Secretaries, all the other positionsare created by the devolution or transition act so its just an amendment (I stand to be corrected on this). Also do not imagine that women will sit back and watch affirmative positions scrapped to mitigate the wage bill... it cannot be that women should once again bare the burden of our collective mismanagement of public affairs so those calling for the removal ofnominated MCAs should just try and think harder.#NiHayoTuKwaSasa
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 09:42:29 +0000
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