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Probing salaries: Making policy, or absence of policy?
2006-05-31 07:26:25
By Nimi Mweta
President Jakaya Kikwete has recently formed a probe team on the structure of civil servants salaries, expected to conduct its work and report before July 1, a rather difficult exercise if ever there was one.
Unless probe commissions formed to investigate an event, or give opinions on a non-controversial issue for instance writing a new constitution or maintaining the present one, this task is difficult. For the only premise that is agreed is that salaries are inadequate, but no formula can guide all commissioners on what is needed.
That is why it is important that at some point, either as they start working or as they proceed with their work in the second, third or other meeting, this deficit is filled.
In one way it is possible the president himself will be in a position to fill such gap assuming he may take a close interest in their work, offer some guidelines or meet say with the probe team leader Deo Ntukamazina to explore the dimensions of the task. So far it is with the office of the Chief Secretary that the matter has been raised, in a sort of hands-off fashion.
One aspect which is likely to constitute a guide to the work, indeed is the only possible reason for constituting the probe team instead simply of making decisions, is that there is need for a living wage for civil servants.
When one can reasonably rely on a salary, holding to the work becomes more important than extracting cash in the course of doing his work, in which case corruption tends to diminish. There is obviously an important aspect of the political will to fight the vice, but imbalances in earnings find an expression in tolerating it.
And it is precisely this aspect which has eluded all salary reviews or schemes since the morrow of independence, and there is no reason why they should succeed this time, even with clearer political will than was the case before.
At one level, an incomes policy is part of economic policy in general, or as economists will say, how income is distributed is a result of how the means of income generation are distributed, in other words, how they are owned. That’s why the slogan ’the economy is growing’looked entirely unconvincing.
In that sense, improving incomes to such an extent that even the lowest paid are assured of an acceptable standard of living means that there is so much to spare, and distribution policy abandons necessary penury (monetary strictness) as an aspect of objectives.
It is not entirely because the past leadership (which largely included many who now hold the reins of office at highest level) did not concern itself with incomes that poverty deepened among civil servants. It’s rather because of having to avoid upsetting the prices applecart.
With inflation now going towards 7.0%, that is, towards the 20th of May, since inflation is now being monitored by the day rather than quarterly or at most monthly data as it used to be in the not so distant past, this prospect is worrying. With everything the same as before, what will be the short term and longer term impact of say a doubling of wages, if the goal really is a living wage?
For it is in actual fact the starting point that provides a host of difficulties, not how to interpret gradations or change other brackets upon this bit.
Thus the issue as to how the minimum wage can be raised to become a living wage is the one for which a probe team has been constituted, right or wrong? It is unlikely that this can be the case, for such a question isn’t answered by a probe team, but by economists.
A probe team needs some basic data to work upon, for instance ’projection of government income for the next five years,’and then determine the total wage bill, and how therefore it should be distributed.
It can’t sit down and discuss how to restructure national income.
At another level of the issue, there are still some basic questions that could still be sorted out within this purely schematic context, of how to distribute a fixed or graduated amount in government earnings.
It is for instance the relatiionship between salaries as such and perks, since this is in actual fact the difficulty about setting out emoluments as a whole and motivating public servants, in particular.
The lower cadre thinks mostly about the level of salary, for their earnings are chiefly limited to salary, save some marginal chance.
The upper levels of the bureaucracy don’t firstly think in terms of salaries for they know there are limits of what can be done to change scales; they focus on perks.
Thus there are two competing ’economies’in the whole issue of improving civil servants’earnings, one that is directed at physical earnings, that is salaries, and another at psychological earnings, that is, motivation.
Quite often it is the latter that takes up the larger chunk of recurrent expenditure, whereas it is only supposed to be additional. But can this issue be solved?
For once, it isn’t at the level of such a probe team that this issue can be resolved, but in the preliminary part, for instance if the CCM election manifesto dwelt on the issue and determined any solutions.
If this wasn’t done, and the president wishes to see changes, it is a matter of being advised, or himself coming up with a ’vision’of how the link should be made or otherwise altered, so that salary become the principal item, not emoluments or other charges.
But a probe team doesn’t clearly discuss this, as it borders on ’rebellion…
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