The cost of employing 66,000 teachers permanently
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
01 August 2010
Felix Kochuka says that his questions are urgent: first, why can’t the government employ all the 66,000 teachers needed; second, what would be the cost? I must admit that I don’t know the answer to the first one so I will just guess…there is probably not enough money to employ them.
We are usually quick to demand that the government
should buy this, or build that, or employ the other without ever
stopping to wonder where the money will come from. Perhaps we should
constantly remember the famous quote from J.F. Kennedy: “Ask
not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your
country”
Regarding the
second question – how much it would cost – we can estimate the answer by
using information that is in the public domain. After the recent pay
rises effected from July this year, the lowest paid teacher will get a
basic salary of about Sh13,000 and the highest ranked will get Sh105,000
per month.
We can use these
figures to get the average salary of a teacher. This comes Sh59,000.
Thus the cost of employing an additional 66,000 would come to about
sh3.9 billion per month; or Sh47 billion per year.
Now that doesn’t
sound correct, does it? That figure is even larger than the total wage
bill of all the teachers in public schools. The problem is that
calculating the simple average of Sh13,000 and Sh105,000 assumes that
the number of teachers in the various salary brackets are equal. That is
obviously not true!
A better way of
going about it would be to work out the “weighted average” salary. This
would take account of the fact that there are more teachers in the lower
brackets than there are in the upper ones. Now that sound complicated
and involving, but it isn’t.
If you think about
it, going through the salary brackets multiplying the number of teachers
their earnings and finally summing the products will simply give you the
total wage bill. Therefore, the quick way of getting this “weighted
average” is to simply divide the total payroll by the number of teachers
in employment.
According to the
Teachers’ Service Commission (TSC), there are 243,000 teachers in the
payroll and they are paid a total of Sh44.4 billion annually. This was
the wage bill before the recent salary increment and it includes basic
salaries and other allowances.
From these figures
we get that the average gross salary of a teacher in the public service
is about Sh183,000 per year, or Sh15,000 per month. After the increments
announced recently, this average will probably go up by about 20 per
cent to Sh18,000. Now that sounds more realistic.
Therefore,
employing the 66,000 might cost the government about Sh1.2 billion per
month, or Sh14 billion per year in addition to the current wage bill.
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