Two weeks ago, the Sunday Nation reported that the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service, Youth and Gender Affairs, Prof Margaret Kobia, was finalising the transfer of key functions from the ministry to Kenya School of Government.
Through the Principal Administrative Secretary, Ms Mary Kimonye, Prof Kobia wants management consultancy services department, which is mainly responsible for driving the affairs of civil service, disbanded and its functions handed to KSG.
The department was formed in 1978 with a clear mandate of advising the Public Service Commission on organisational structures, ministerial functions, staffing levels, developing and reviewing schemes of service and career guidelines for different cadres across the civil service. It also allocates personal numbers to all civil servants.
Essentially, the department offers free consultancy services to the public service. This begs the question as to the motive of those planning to disband it and take its services to KSG.
The functions that the department executes are largely delegated to it by the PSC. As such, CAS Kimonye, who signed the letter announcing the decision, lacks the constitutional mandate to do so.
Even the CS cannot just wake up and decide to move a department. That can only be done through a presidential executive order.
But the plan is not surprising as there has been a trend in some parts of the government to retain a coterie of advisers on higher job groups.
The net effect of retaining a huge number of advisers, some of them hired on questionable grounds, is that it has brought confusion in the processing and implementation of public policies.
Another effect of hiring many advisers from outside a ministry is that the voice of senior civil servants, otherwise referred to as policymakers, is never heard.
These advisers have cut off career bureaucrats from accessing the executives as most decisions being made by the State are not processed through the policy-making chamber — the boardrooms.
A civil service serves to stabilise the effects of a partisan political environment at any given time because civil servants are obligated to serve the government of the day.
That is why it must be guarded from infiltration by individuals whose allegiance is not to the general public but partisan quarters.
It would appear that moving HR and research outfits is a calculated move to bring in more advisers as private consultants to carry out what officers in MCS have been doing.
Since no other logical reason informs the decision why key departments are being moved from the mainstream civil service to a training institution, Kenyans are left with no option but to speculate.
President Uhuru Kenyatta and Parliament must rise to the occasion and rein in on overzealous ministers.
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