Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, gestures as he attends a conference in Paris in June 2023.
The short stint I had working in government, one thing that struck me was bosses having two to four large tea flasks in their offices every day. The rest of the staff were only allowed a cup of tea a day, if lucky.
I thought then and still do, that no one human being could finish four large tea flasks in a day. Most days, the flasks would end up being emptied out at the end of the day. I now realise it was all vanity, and it didn’t matter to the senior civil servants because it was funded by the taxpayers.
What is in a cup of tea in the office, you may ask? That is not the question. The question is whether spending taxpayers’ money to fill four tea flasks to satisfy one public servant’s ego, is fair to the taxpayer? The wastage of taxpayers’ money tends to be looked at through unnecessary expenditure by senior government officials, which adds little value to the citizens’ lives and does less more to advance the country economically.
The purchase of expensive cars and homes for senior government officials, proves often that the officials are influenced by style over substance. Hence, in the current government, the rush was to obtain designer fashion wear from expensive shoes to watches, as soon as it came to power.
Billions of shillings were set aside in subsidiary budgets to get a new lick of paint for a few government offices, when our Police still lack decent homes, and many children go to crumbling schools. Government retreats are another wastage of taxpayers’ money with Cabinet Secretaries and MPs leading in such drainage, as they choose to conference in expensive hotels rather than the designated government conference halls.
Office hours are just in print as many government employees spend more time chasing up personal ‘hustles’ than serve the public. Kenyan civil servants are notorious for letting their coats do the work for them, as they hang them behind their chairs to give the illusion of just being around, when in actual fact they have not been in office for years.
National importance
Ghost workers are not spirits in Kenya. They are in fact manufactured. It is easy to do so as regular checks and audits on staff are rarely carried out. However, it is unfair to expect civil servants to be glued to their chairs when politicians hardly report for work unless they are chasing up sitting allowances. Parliament is one example where quorum for sitting allowance is higher than when Parliament is discussing issues of national importance.
Elon Musk’s introduction of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) system in the US has highlighted the wastage of taxpayers’ money, through the loss of funds that is spent to purchase mundane stuff and government buildings with lights on forever, lying fallow as civil servants pretend to work from home. It is the idea of running a large building with only a skeleton staff that is the issue.
US is lucky, however, to tiff over empty buildings. We have billions paid out to contractors who leave buildings half-finished in Kenya or in some cases never built at all. Money for nothing is what we are used to calling corruption in Kenya but in actual fact it is wastage of taxpayers’ money.
Corruption
The taxes collected and the loans borrowed on behalf of the citizens that go to waste, is what now needs a DOGE style policy to end it. Would DOGE work in Kenya in the first place? That is the million-dollar question in a country plagued by corruption, but again why not?
There is a clear class divide between the government in Kenya and the citizens, with the former getting the lion’s share of the taxpayers’ money, while the citizens get the crumbs. The tide now needs to turn in favour of the citizens. One way of balancing the needs of the country is by stopping wastage and using the national resources prudently and equally.
What the country now needs is a brutal assessment of government expenditure on trivial goods, services and civil servants’ performance to purge the wastage reported year-on-year. The exercise should be handled by an independent body comprising accomplished individuals, with no vested interests but altruistic intention to help the country save money and channel it the right way.
DOGE may sound technical but essentially it is just a way to reflect on how the country is being run and push the reset button to a better way of managing the civil service and stop wastage of taxpayers’ money. It is bound to face resistance from selfish and bigoted government officials, but it is an exercise whose time has arrived. DOGE ‘s style of work is being copied across the world - I see no reason why Kenya won’t.
Ms Guyo is a legal researcher, [email protected], @kdiguyo
