Sunday, August 7, 2011

Peanuts for the commissioner

By Ibrahim NdamweNews that police officers received a pay hike recently was heartening. But the figure published in the newspapers as salary for the commissioner of police is a big joke. Are we serious? This country pays its top policeman a miserable Sh179,000?
See, unlike members of Parliament, the police boss pays tax so it is a safe bet that the big man takes home about Sh110,000. Throw in a few loans owed to the Police Sacco for school fees and the purchase of a plot here and there and it’s not inconceivable that he could as well be earning Sh80,000 a month.
Beats me why anyone would bust his guts out chasing criminals all over the country for the equivalent of what a secretary working for an NGO earns. Yet in the meantime, we pay MPs nearly four times as much although few of them can be said to work half as hard as the police boss.
Dawn to duskHe gets to his office at dawn and leaves well past dusk. He’s never been on "recess" and wouldn’t go to Zanzibar on holiday because he can’t afford it. If he made the mistake of walking into a bank for a mortgage, his pay slip would shrink to death.
In any case, the only mortgage that salary can buy would assure him a home in neighbourhoods far beneath his stature where we he would be rubbing shoulders with young men half his age.
With that pay package, he would be mad to invest in a fuel guzzler because he wouldn’t afford to service or fuel it. The man can, therefore, only afford a second hand Japanese import of the Toyota saloon type. Even then, he would have to ration visits to his village.
FiredAnd you know the worst part? If we woke up one morning and fired him, he wouldn’t be getting Sh1 million as a send off package. He would be stuck with a monthly Sh60,000 pension, which is not a lot of money when you have been a commissioner of police.
In short, we face the prospect of forcing a man who served his country with honour and distinction to rear two cows and sell milk to fellow villagers to make ends meet upon retirement.
And yet to rise to the level of police commissioner, he spent years exchanging gunfire with criminals, sleeping in bushes and risking his life before someone grudgingly promoted him to chief inspector of police.
Contrast that with MPs where a chap wakes up, donates footballs to a few village football teams, rants at funerals, hangs onto the coat-tails of a senior politician, buys changa’a for idle youth, gives women salt and sugar and becomes elevated to a millionaire in one year flat.
He could say nothing in Parliament, vanish from his constituency, carouse in the Jacuzzi at Parliament buildings, chase skirts for years, and still earn four times as much as the police commissioner.

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