National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gladys Boss has weighed in on the ongoing debate about Kenya’s wage bill, emphasizing that Kenyans prioritize service delivery and the performance of public servants over the portion of the national budget allocated to officials’ salaries.
Boss’s remarks come in response to President William Ruto’s recent message to striking doctors, where he highlighted the country’s struggle with a substantial wage bill, citing it as a hindrance to meeting the demands of public sector employees.
However, according to Boss, the key concern for Kenyans lies not in the employment of public officials but in the quality of service they provide.
“Kenyans don’t have a problem with employing people; what they have been demanding is performance, that is the challenge,” Shollei stated while speaking on Citizen TV’s Daybreak program.
Boss proposed that the solution to addressing Kenya’s wage bill is not simply reducing salaries but rather focusing on economic transformation to broaden the tax base.
“We should be focusing more on economic transformation. If we have economic transformation as a country, we will be collecting more taxes and have more resources to pay for the workforce,” she explained. “It will be 35 % of a big amount.”
