Gov offers to pay bonus with pieces of land, angry Civil Servants rejects dubious offer; calls for s

In what became a dump squib and a much ado about nothing show, the government all but admitted that it cannot pay civil servants bonuses for 2016 at a meeting held in Harare today, 25 January 2017.

The government called for the meeting after restive civil servants, mainly rural teachers, heeded the call by the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) for a go slow until bonuses are paid which started when schools opened on 10 January 2017.

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa presented 3 vague and dubious options for civil servants bonuses. The first option is that of non-monetary incentives. Under this scheme, the government offered to give stands to civil servants as an incentive to replace bonuses.

Secondly, government offered to bond civil servants bonuses in infrastructure and other investment projects which government will undertake and the civil servants will get their money when the investments start to pay off. Thirdly, government offered to pay 50% of civil servant bonuses in cash and the other 50% in non-monetary incentives.

This was totally rejected by all the civil servants unions who demanded that their bonuses be paid in cash as this is what government owes workers.

Making ARTUZ’s intervention, Secretary General Robson Chere, pointed out that unions were already negotiating for stands with local authorities for their respective members and there was no need for government to replicate their efforts.

He went further and demanded that the government pay out the money as they spent millions of Dollars on holiday allowances for ministers and top government bureaucrats and US$35 million in President Mugabe’s travels alone.

And this was not all.

In an incriminating disclosure, Minister Chinamasa told the meeting that the government is in huge employment cost arrears in respect of Premier Services Medical Aid Society (PSMAS) remittances, the National Social Security Authority (NSSA) pension remittances and employee stop order deductions.

For PSMAS, the government is in arrears of US$98.9 million which has virtually made it impossible for hundreds thousands of government workers to access health care even though their money is being deducted.

In respect of NSSA the government is in arrears of US$173.1 million in unpaid pensions since September 2013. The pension remittance scam comes as no surprise as ARTUZ long pointed out that the scheme was nothing but hot air meant to cut the salary of workers.

The downside of this catastrophe is that many civil servants will retire without a pension as the government has neither the capacity nor will to plug the big hole they have created at NSSA.

The government also owes US$10.3 million in stop order deduction arrears meaning that many civil servants are at loggerheads with their various service providers who do not get their money from government yet it has been deducted from the payslip.

Secretary General Chere went further and argued that it was unacceptable that the government was presiding over this sorry state of things which jeopardised the interest of workers. He went further and called for government to curb corruption, stop looting of our resources, cut travel and holiday allowances in order to create fiscal space for bonus payments and improvement of government worker’s welfare.

After the meeting ARTUZ will urgently serve the public service commission with a notification to go on strike within 14 days if the government does not release dates for bonus payments.

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