In 1961 Frantz Fanon scathingly characterised the emerging African elite as a bourgeoisie of the civil
service. Many others have since described Africa’s public sector employees as a privileged rentier
class that grew disproportionately large in relation to the continent’s under-developed private sector.
Is this characterisation accurate? Using data on employment and income from Kenya and Tanzania,
this paper aims to situate public sector employees in two African countries within their respective
national income distribution in order to establish the share of high-income households that were
headed by public servants. It argues that public sector employees did not remain a privileged group
for very long after independence in either country. To the detriment of the nascent middle class,
politicians deliberately held down formal sector wages between the 1970s and early 1990s. While
public sector employees started the postcolonial era as an important share of the middle and upper
classes, this share subsequently declined. In 1976 Kenyan public sector employees comprised roughly
44% of those earning an average teacher’s wage or above. This ratio had dropped to 30-35% by 1994
and roughly 22% by 2005/06. In Tanzania the public sector share of the top income decile fell from an
estimated 25% in 1969 to 13% in 2011/12. In both countries moreover, public sector-headed
households relied on multiple income sources to meet household consumption needs during the
economic downturn. Without recourse to secondary incomes from farming, businesses or other
employment, public sector-headed households would have seen a considerably larger income decline.
The corollary to the declining share of public sector employees among high income earners was an
increase in the share of private sector employees and business owners at the top of the income
distribution. This suggests that after a long teething period, East Africa’s private sector may finally be
coming into its own.