The Third National Wage Bill Conference at the Bomas of Kenya on April 17, 2024.
As widely expected, President William Ruto will shortly be shaking up the civil service bureaucracy. As a journalist who has been reporting, keenly following and commenting about the change and reform of the state apparatus for many years, here is what I think President Ruto should consider if his intention is to implement meaningful reform in the structure of the public service.
First, can we start by aligning State departments to ministries by scrapping most of the politically-motivated departments so that we can go back to the arrangement where each ministry has only one principle secretary? If we are serious about reducing the ballooning public wage bill, why don’t we go the whole hog and collapse the mushrooming State departments so as to restore the old structure where they were headed by directors? Is it not the height of irony that a function as tiny as Diaspora Affairs is under a full State department, complete with a principal secretary earning millions of shillings paid for by the taxpayer?
And, we need to redress the confusion around the nomenclature of some the top public service positions so that there is harmony across the whole civil service bureaucracy. Today, the National Treasury’s Executive Committee is headed by mandarins carrying the title, ‘director-general’. Yet, across the civil service bureaucracy, you will not come across that title anywhere. Until 2014, the National Treasury was run by 14 departments each headed by a director reporting to the accounting officer.
Senior officers
Why is it that some ministries have these senior officers carrying the title ‘secretary’, when others ministries and State departments don’t? Many years ago, and as young reporters, the only public servant carrying the title, ‘secretary’— apart from the defunct offices of chief secretary, and financial secretary — was a fellow called George Mitine, who was the investment secretary in charge of privatisation. The understanding in those days was that a ‘secretary’ was not supposed to head mainstream departments but to run highly specialised, mission-specific units that were supposed to fold once their objective was achieved.
For example, privatisation was a dated programme and, therefore, needed to be headed by a secretary. Today, we have ‘secretaries’ coming out of our ears. They are just too many and remain a big drag on taxpayer-funded wages. In the past, the Central Posting Committee under the Office of the President was a powerful institution that enjoyed exclusive powers in the posting common cadre staff.
Thoroughly abused
Today, the system of posting staff is thoroughly abused especially by the current generation of principal secretaries parachuted into the civil service bureaucracy through political appointments and made to occupy these key positions before they have imbibed the traditions and the esprit de corps that define our civil service.
Insiders will confide to you that even the system of scheme of service administrator that gives the responsibility of posting economists to the PS planning, accountants to the Directorate Accounting at the National Treasury, and administrators, the PS planning is routinely interfered with by the new generation of politically-appointed principal secretaries.
With regard to governance of parastatals, I think President Ruto should consider scrapping the Harambee House based entity called the State Corporations Advisory Committee (SCAC) because it merely introduces another layer of bureaucracy in the running of State corporations.
The mess in corporate governance is happening because parastatals are run by too many power centres. For example, as a CEO of a parastatal, you report to your board, to the permanent secretary of your line ministry. To the CS at the National Treasury who must approve your budgets and — under the State Corporations Act — to entities under the Office of the President, including SCAC and the Inspectorate of Statutory Boards. The confusion is compounded by the fact that parent ministries appoint representatives on boards of parastatals.
A CEO of a parastatal can wake up one morning to find that the Efficiency Monitoring Unit is auditing the books of the corporation. This Tower of Babel is why it has been difficult to enforce accountability in the parastatal sector in Kenya. Before a CEO of a parastatal can travel out of them country,he or she my first seek clearance from SCAC and is forced to fill forms requiring him to provide mundane details, such as the purpose of the trip, the amount of imprest he will carry and the number of days he will spend outside the country.
Regulatory bodies such as Communications Authority of Kenya, Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, the Competition Authority and National Environment Management Authority under their own Acts of parliament.
The priority of priorities: professionalise the civil service and evolve and build a new generation of highly trained team leaders who can drive the civil service to high levels of meritocracy and efficient service delivery.
jaindikisero@gmail.com
