Teachers And Civil Servants To Get Pay Rise As Treasury Allocates Funds

Recommendations from the Salaries and remuneration commission, SRC, on giving teachers and civil servants a pay rise in July have finally sailed through. They are now set to get a huge share of the 2023/2023 budget translating to a fatter pay cheque.

Teachers and civil servants are set to receive a 17.7 billion shillings salary increment in the new financial year that starts on July 1 after the Treasury allocated the money in the budget in what could worsen Kenya’s wage bill crisis.

However, the national treasury and SRC are in consultation on the kind of salary increments teachers and civil servants will enjoy. Once the consultations are done and a clear framework is settled on, the funds will be released to respective departments, ministries, and agencies.

Once this is implemented, it will bring to an end two-year salary freezes on all teachers and civil servants. The increase comes at a time when there is a liquidity crunch that has paralyzed the government.

Treasury Principal Secretary Chris Kiptoo told Parliament that the money had been factored into the 2023/24 estimates following recommendations of a job evaluation by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).

“We have allocated Sh17.7 billion for salary increment for civil servants following a job evaluation exercise by the SRC,” Dr. Kiptoo told MPs.

“I and the Cabinet Secretary Njuguna Ndung’u met the SRC last week over the job evaluation recommendations. We are in consultation and once we agree and the decision is officially communicated, we will release the money to various ministries, departments, and agencies of government.”

Dr. Kiptoo said the Sh17.7 billion allocation is an indication of the cost of the salary review report that the SRC has presented to the Treasury.

He appeared before the National Assembly’s Committee on Finance and National Planning to explain the ministry’s budget for the financial year 2023/24. Dr. Kiptoo did not provide the timeline within which the Treasury and the SRC were likely to announce the new salary structures.

An estimated 954,900 civil servants are pushing for salary reviews to compensate for the tough economic times that pushed the country’s inflation to 9.2 percent in the months of February to April.

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“Kenya’s nominal wage bill has been increasing every year. The expenditure on wage bill (Personnel Emoluments – PE) as a proportion of the total expenditure in most counties, has remained above the Public Finance Management (PFM) Regulations, 2015, the recommended ratio of 30 percent over the recent years,” said the SRC in its Wage Bill bulletin.

In March, SRC announced that it approved pay rise requests worth Sh2.18 billion in the six months to December amid a government push to contain the public wage bill.

The SRC said it received 50 requests from public service institutions on remuneration and benefits estimated to cost Sh2.29 billion but advised the national and county governments to approve requests worth Sh2.18 billion.

Bonus requests topped the list at Sh1.47 billion followed by allowances review and benefits at Sh647.5 million and Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) at Sh325 million. The Treasury has been struggling to tame the bloated public wage bill that now consumes more than half of the total revenue, impeding spending on development projects.

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