Time to free civil service from clutches of political patronage

They then turned the State into de facto source of employment. Successive administrations have been packaging the public sector with all manner of political lackeys.

State sector jobs became the source of political patronage. This resulted in an inefficient public service while bloating the wage bill.

How do we, therefore, reform our public service? When Moses Kuria suggested that we should put all civil servants on contract, a friend joked that the civil service cannot be run like someone managing an employment bureau for unskilled workers going to the Gulf countries.

To increase efficiency, a thorough audit is imperative. Weed out all those who joined the civil service using fake academic papers. Make sure we have a public service that is truly anchored on meritocracy. Match assignment with technical competence.

This should apply to the two levels of government. It's laughable when a holder of a degree in theology (no offence to theologians) is in charge of construction.

A lot of time is wasted as the civil servant learns on the job. Further, we must not run the civil service as though we are a primitive society. It's impossible to have an efficient civil service when reciprocal altruism and kin selection overrides other considerations in appointments.

A deliberate effort to de-politicise the civil service requires the fierce urgency of now. A bureaucracy staffed with a politicians’ cronies almost inevitably performs poorly.

Without the threat of bankruptcy, like in the private sector and no easy matrices of performance, a civil service stuffed with patronage appointees becomes very hard to reform for every effort will be construed by the patronage beneficiaries as an onslaught against them.

That is why when President Mwai Kibaki came in 2003, there was an outcry by Rift Valley politicians that they were being targeted. But this again is where Mr Kibaki dropped the ball.

For every appointment revocation of someone from Rift Valley, he had a ready replacement from Central Kenya. These appointees then made sure everyone they brought in was from their backyard.

The security agencies have equally suffered what other commentators have described as ‘tribalised security agencies’. It's for this reason that appointment of Francis Ogolla to the helm of Kenya’s military together with the recent promotions in the military are a welcome break.