Last week, we saw that we can pay teachers better by improving tax collections, eliminating duplicitous programmes and pork barrel projects, and by reallocating money. We didn’t even have to take a knife to the bloated political appointees as FDC presidential candidate Kizza Besigye has promised.
We were left with two questions; whether we should pay teachers more, and whether that would solve the problem. The first is a moral issue, the second a rational one.
Few people would argue against the need to pay teachers better. They play an important role, work long hours, and in difficult circumstances. Based on publicly available data, teachers are paid an average monthly wage of Shs354,700, or just over $100. Are they poorly paid? Yes and no, for this is a relative question.
One would argue that, compared to soldiers who put their lives on the line and earn slightly more, this income is, relatively speaking, understandable. Yet drivers, receptionists, and even cleaners earn more in many public offices.
So while there is a moral hazard risk that raising teachers’ salaries will spark similar demands from medical workers, police officers and the like, there is also a glaring problem of inequity in public pay. You cannot let some officials set their own hefty salaries while claiming there isn’t enough money to pay others better.
This is mostly a problem of politics, not economics. In the 1960s, middle-class professions, including teaching, paid meaningful wages. The economic crisis from 1975 to the late 1980s saw a collapse in wages and by 1991, the government wage bill in Uganda was just 1.7 per cent of GDP, compared to five per cent in Ghana and 9 per cent in Kenya. Teachers earned Shs126,327 per year, a third of the GDP-to-worker ratio, and together with other traditional civil servants, earned just 35 to 40 per cent of the average Ugandan wage.
Under the reforms of the Structural Adjustment Programme in the 1990s, the civil service was cut in half, pay consolidated and salaries raised. The wage bill rose to over 4 per cent of GDP. Things got interesting after 1996. The introduction of Universal Primary Education saw an increase in the number of teachers and their workload, but not necessarily in their wages.
It also led to the elimination of the PTA allowances at the time the government, now less disciplined and more prone to patrimonial pandering, was quietly reintroducing allowances to traditional civil servants and public officers, and expanding the number of political appointees.
The sad plight of teachers is symptomatic of the wider woes of Ugandan workers. If you lined up all Ugandan workers in 2013, the one in the middle earned Shs110,000 per month, which was up from Shs80,000 in 2010, but flat in real terms, and less than half of average monthly household expenditure.
Of the 7.9 million Ugandans available for work, half can’t find jobs or are self-employed; less than a third of those who find work have secondary education or specialised training and are, therefore, poorly paid and unproductive; and women are, on average, paid half what men get.
Why is it teacher pay making the news? It’s because other professions, while also poorly paid, have created rent-seeking opportunities. Civil servants live off workshops and fictitious travel and sitting allowances; medical workers sell drugs and their labour; journalists sell stories and judges sell judgments. Poor teachers – if only there was a black market for chalk!
We must do three things: improve the quality of the labour force and its productivity through rethinking our entire education system and putting skills ahead of paper qualifications; transform from agrarian subsistence agriculture to an export-oriented, market-focused value chain that creates higher-pay jobs and acts as a foundation for a manufacturing and industrial economy; move people to urban areas and provide services more cheaply and effectively to them to reduce household expenditure on food, health, education and transport.
In other words, President Museveni is right to say that the priority should be to grow the economy and invest in social goods – but you do that while running a bloated, inefficient and incompetent government.
Mr Kalinaki is a Ugandan journalist based in Nairobi. dkalinaki@ke.nationmedia.com Twitter: @Kalinaki
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