The jubilee government did try to
make merry on their birthday by breaking its own law against holding government
retreats in expensive private resorts. President Uhuru decided that all his
cabinet secretaries, tugging along their principal secretaries, should have a
piece of the ‘birthday cake’ at the exclusive Mount Kenya Safari Club for 3
days.
What leaves a bad aftertaste is that
thousands of employed civil servants who serve under them are waiting to eat
the crumbs from the cake; the cruelest ‘birthday gift’. They are about to lose their jobs. You see,
the Jubilee Government insists its inability to contain the spiraling and
runaway wage bill in the civil service, is due to the fact that many Kenyans are
employed in the civil service (methinks that is wonderful). So for the civil servants
to swallow their last crumbs from the birthday cake, they need an extra
incentive in the form of sheer desperation.
The spanner is already in works as
the government, through devolution secretary Anne Waiguru, seeks 2 billion in
the next fiscal year (2014-2015) to retrench them. Despite the fact, the plight
of the civil servants, already worse, it is shuttling towards the worst. The
fact that they are still employed makes them a little better off. Though on the
flip-side, the crumbling economy has adverse effects on them. A painstaking
look at the civil servants leaves a lot be desired.
The government wants us to believe
that civil service is just like any other profession; employees have something
to offer, employers consider it’s what they need, and they sign a contract. But
in the real employment world, mostly the civil service, that is far from
reality. The stark truth is that the civil service has a power relationship in
terms of pecking order. There is the government which expects you to follow
their blueprint in service delivery, failure to do so will render you jobless; which
is a wonderful dogma. Though, if the government values their workers, they
should fire them on the basis of their performance and not atrocious demands
due to economic slump.
This
explains the ideology of employment being a power relationship, the fear of
being retrenched hence unemployed is definitely causing jitters further
weakening the already weak civil servants. The weakness can be measured by
viewing the quitting (voluntary quitting) statistics. One might contemplate
quitting a job due to a litany of issues. But for career civil servants, it is a
mountain to climb because they do not easily get a job due to their
specialization. There is also the fear of losing their gold-plated final salary
pensions.
The
jubilee government is trying to harvest from the low hanging fruits of the
economy, bantam economics 101. In terms of the civil servants bargaining power,
the economy is weak, so they are not empowered. They are unable to quit even
when they are being fed the ‘birthday cake’ crumbs. Because they will lose out
on the generous government pension scheme and won’t be able to find a new job.
So for the time being, the civil servants are trapped in the fear economy,
eating the crumbs while their masters celebrate the ‘birthday’.
Too many civil servants are
currently living in a climate of economic fear. There are many routes that we
can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to let the
civil servants retain their jobs while there be a complete
overhaul of the sitting allowance for public officers who attend board meetings
in parastatals.
The government of the day is blinded
and is not aware that the tipping point is around the corner... when thousands
of civil servants losing their employment benefits and thousands more
struggling under the yoke of wage stagnation, pension loss, and intolerable
working conditions see the light, realize how badly the political system has
failed us, and collectively assert our human rights. Are we about to witness a debacle reminiscent
of the Arab upheavals? A redundant NO! we will still be in the woods.
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