The future is not so promising for the thousands dying to land government jobs because the wage bill happened. Government is all over the place, trying to cut down on salaries and remunerations through the Public Service Commission, a statutory body that employs civil servants which will be rolling out a contract based hiring mechanism from July 1st in the next financial year.
The shift to performance contracting model is the new measure the government os banking on to tame the ballooning public sector wage bill.
“The contract will be three years which will be renewable based on satisfactory performance. We want to resist from making people feel that its only the public service that can provide that employment,” said Stephen Kirogo, Chairman Public Service Commission.
According to a public sector wage bill released on government spending, allowances and salaries to public servants are expected to hit Ksh 790 Billion in this financial year up from Ksh 526 Billion in 2013 taking the public wage bill to ordinary revenue ratio to 43%. The new measure is to cut down on the government pension burden which has been growing from 27.6 billion in 2014 to 63.9 Billion shillings last year.
Most of the counties have been spending over 35% of their resources on salaries and allowances, policymakers say that higher wage bills are hurting delivery of services as fewer funds are available for development purposes.
“We are managing the human capital of the republic, the capital we have to spend a lot of money educating and acquiring skills, etc, but we are not getting returns on that human resource capital,” said Dalmas Otieno Deputy Chairman Salaries and Remuneration Commission.
Employees joining the service fresh from colleges and universities will be issued with performance targets forms which they will sign before they are offered employment letters. Government is also set to scrap the current scheme of service and introduce the career progression guidelines.
