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"id": 195779,
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"speaker_name": "The Assistant Minister, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministry of Local Government",
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"content": "April 29, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 737 Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I am looking froward to the day when this Parliament will be in a position to discuss and peruse the current accounts of the Government. It behooves upon the Minister for Finance to do all that is possible to make sure that this actually happens. If it happens, then we will be able to take action on the Accounting Officers. However, as of now, we can only lament. This is actually history. We are just reading history of what happened. There is nothing much we can do to correct the wrongs that are mentioned in these Reports. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, there is something else which we need to talk about. If you look at the amount of money which the Kenya Government spends on salaries, you will see that it is substantial. We must take the bull by the horns and accept that our payrolls are not consistent. There are some positions, which on the face of it, are highly paid, while others are not. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, if you look at salary difference between a Permanent Secretary and a Deputy Secretary, you will see that the difference is too wide. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We need to borrow what other governments have done. For example, in the USA, they have specific salary scales for the Federal Government. I think, they have Grades 1-12. It does not matter in which Ministry or parastatal you are, if you are on Grade 6, you can move from one Ministry to another and still go with your grade. The allowances for that particular position may be different. So, we need to borrow from what other governments have done. We need to look into the issue of remuneration for our public servants and try to justify them. We have scales that are personal to the individual employees. If this were to happen, you would find that more efficiency would obtain. In effect, it will be possible for youto move from one Ministry to the another or from one parastatal to another. At the moment, this is not possible. So, we need to take some drastic steps on our salary scales. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, the other issue is on categories of our public servants. Again, we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can copy what other governments have done. For example, if we are to borrow what the USA has done, they have two categories of staff. There is what they call \"professional\" and \"political\" staff. If you are in the political grade, and they are all stated very clearly, then, when the term of that administration lapses, all the political appointees will go home with the President. Therefore, the incoming President is in a position to appoint his or her own political appointees. But for the professional cadre, it has no effect. I think they have gone one step further than the British, which tries to pretend that civil servants work for the Government that is in power. If this classification was done, then these controversies we have been hearing of one party wanting to have two Permanent Secretaries in one Ministry going down up to messengers; you will have one messenger for PNU and another for ODM; two chiefs in the same location, one for ODM and one for PNU--- I think such issues would not have arisen. This is because the categories will be very clear. If you are in the professional category, it does not matter which administration is in Government. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, we must also recognise that we are now in a Grand Coalition. For this coalition to work, certain discipline must be maintained. Over the weekend, I was very saddened to hear Cabinet Ministers criticising each other in public. It was a very sad day for this country. We heard even some Assistant Ministers criticising Cabinet Ministers. To me, that is total lack of discipline. For this Grand Coalition to survive, there has to be discipline in the Cabinet. I think, one of the functions which we gave the Prime Minister was to supervise the Ministers. I think he should start supervising and disciplining Ministers who quarrel in public with regard to the issue of the pecking order. Unless we have discipline in the Cabinet, this Grand Coalition may not survive for five 738 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 29, 2008 years. But it can survive because that is what Kenyans want. Kenyans want a Grand Coalition, but we must have discipline. To start with, I think in the first Cabinet meeting, they should resolve that no Cabinet Minister will ever criticise a fellow Minister in public. That is what Cabinet is for. They can have their quarrels in the Cabinet meetings, but when they come out of the Cabinet, we should see them smiling, shaking hands, hugging each other and eating together. That is what Kenyans want to see. They do not want to see, on their television screens or in the Print Media, Cabinet Ministers quarrelling among themselves. That way, you will wonder what the Cabinet is for. That is what killed the NARC dream. Ministers started quarrelling in public. That is what killed the NARC dream of 2002. Some of us were very sad that the NARC dream aborted. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, if you look at the Reports, you will also see that the Ministry of Agriculture spent so much money, however, our food prices cannot be sustained. Our food prices are becoming almost out of reach for the ordinary mwananchi. This trend is affecting everybody in this country. We must come up with ways and means of reducing the escalating food prices. We can joke with politics and other things, but we cannot joke with somebody's stomach. Lack of food or high prices of food has caused revolutions in other countries. For example, in France, it caused a revolution. Already, three Prime Ministers have been dismissed in other governments because of high food prices. The surprising thing is that we have the solution to this problem at hand. The solution is so simple. The solution is to facilitate the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to go back to their"
}