CIVIL SERVANTS TO EAT JUBILEE ‘BIRTHDAY CAKE’ CRUMBS

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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