The average pay in counties has dipped for the first time since devolution as devolved units turn to hiring cheaper or lower-ranking employees.
Official data indicates that the average pay of the 226,500 employees stood at Sh71,316 last year from Sh74,673 the prior year, having risen over the past decade from a low of Sh39,158 in 2014.
This emerged in a year when the counties continued their hiring binge that started with devolution in 2013, pushing their staff count to 226,500 from 221,400 a year earlier and 131,900 in 2014.
This is a pointer that counties have stepped up the hiring of low-ranked employees like clerks and cleaners, bringing down the average pay.
It helped the 47 devolved units to cut the overall wage bill to Sh193.8 billion last year, up from Sh198.3 billion.
County governors have in the past defied calls for to curb ballooning wage bills in order to free up resources for projects.
While the national government went slow on hiring, counties stepped up recruitment in recent years, squeezing allocation for development projects like building roads, water and sewerage infrastructure.
Counties added 95,000 workers between 2014 and last year in a period that saw the central government increase staff numbers by 56, 000.
“TSC (Teachers Service Commission), which is the largest employer in the public sector, registered the highest growth of 5.2 per cent in 2024,” said the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) in a year when counties increased employment by 2.3 percent, parastatals 1.2 percent and national government 1.3 percent.
The suppressed average earnings in the devolved units come at a time the Controller of Budget (CoB) has sounded an alarm over their spending a staggering 70 percent of their available budget on salaries and wages.
In a report, CoB Margaret Nyakang’o indicates the counties, for instance, spent Sh38.69 billion on salaries, wages and allowances in the three months ended last September out of the available Sh55.68 billion.
Earlier, data from the Commission for Revenue Allocation (CRA) had indicated that between the fiscal year ended June 2014 and the one ended June 2023, counties had collectively received Sh3.62 trillion, out of which Sh1.21 trillion had been spent on personal emoluments.
The CRA stated that the proportion of total expenditure that went to staff pay went as high as 62 percent in some counties, violating the legally set limit of 35 percent of total realised revenue.
Governors have in the past been accused of presiding over a hiring spree spurred by the need to reward cronies and relatives with jobs.
The latest report by Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu has flagged shared names on county payrolls, irregular promotions and fictitious payments to non-existent staff as some of the underhand schemes employed by rogue officers to perpetuate payroll fraud in the devolved units.
For instance, Ms Gathungu’s review of Nairobi County’s bank remittance of the executive’s payroll covering August 2023, for example, revealed that some 74 officers shared the same name while 3,216 other officers changed job groups more than once within the year, with some changing up to three times.
