Let the market decide.

National defence. Public safety. Diplomacy. Oversight. That's it. Privatise public services. Reduce taxes. Let the market you love so much decide. Let the public service you revere so much do what it is designed to do: collect taxes; engage in foreign relations; fight wars; keep people safe; make laws and regulations; oversee the private sector.

The public service is a mess. Teachers, doctors, nurses and policemen have been given the short end of the stick for dogs' years. Teachers have won award after award in the law courts and the national Executive has balked at paying them their dues. Teachers' unions believe that "this time it will be different." I don't know what fantasy Mr Sossion and his colleagues in the union leadership are living in, but if they believe that by going on strike they will force Henry Rotich, Jacob Kaimenyi or Lydia Nzomo to unearth a secret seventeen billion shilling cache, they'd better bottle whatever they're drinking; they'd make a killing.

The public service, after the World Bank/International Monetary Fund prescription of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s and 1990s is in no position to effectively deliver public services. It has been hollowed out. With the finite resources at its command, it can do very few things well. Hence, public safety, national defence, diplomacy and oversight. No more, no less.

Private providers of education have beat the public sector in the only area that matters: the final score at national examinations. Since Mwai Kibaki's laudable free basic education programme, it is now plain to see that the public sector cannot cope with the very large pupil population. It cannot build the infrastructure required to the standard needed to properly educate the large number of pupils enrolled in the public school system. Worse, it cannot engage the required number of teachers at a fair wage to educate these children.

Teaching is also not a low- or even medium-skill occupation. It’s one that requires significant training and education. Teachers have to know how to manage a crowd, tend to a variety of emotional needs, comply with government requirements and regulations, not to mention pass on critical knowledge to a group of children in their formative years. ~ Bryce Covert, Teachers Shouldn't Teach for Free (Slate.com)

The honeymoon is over. The gravy train has left the station; few of us are on board. There are no more free lunches. It is time we accepted that we are not living in boom times, that the pernicious legacy of the SAPs is here for the foreseeable future, and that unless we are will to fundamentally restructure the public service, there is little need for the public service we have. Let these services that are ineffectively and inefficiently provided by the public sector be offloaded onto the private sector and the world of public benefit organisations and let the public sector concentrate on things only it can do.

The corruption that has made the public sector such an ineffective deliverer of services might persist for a short while, but with the public sector no longer awarding tenders except in the public safety and national security areas, but it will pass. The risk that the private sector will live only for the bottom line might not be a bad thing: for private sector players to survive, they will have to train the best, pay them the best, in order to remain the best. The public sector will make the rules by which they will play and crack down - hard - when they do not.

Utopian? Maybe. Devolution, for example, has had very mixed results. The scale of dysfunction in the health sector was there before devolution and seems to have gotten worse under devolution. Public sector health workers are not necessarily bad at their jobs; the management of the sector by the national and devolved governments has proven to be greatly ineffective. Perhaps it is time to adopt a more buccaneering model: let the medics sell their services to the highest bidder; let the ministry keep an eye on quality; for the moment, let the National Treasury subsidise those who meet certain poverty criteria. Carrying on as we are is simply throwing good money after bad.