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Auxilia Katongomara Chronicle Reporter
NATIONAL Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) workers have petitioned the parastatal’s board urging it to fire the company’s management for alleged mismanagement.

In the petition dated April 28, addressed to NRZ board chairman Alvord Mabena, the parastatal’s workers’ unions said the deepening crisis at the firm was mainly due to mismanagement. Mabena could not be reached for comment yesterday as his phone rang unanswered.

However, in their petition workers accused management of lack of capacity to manage the organisation, failure to resolve the current employee salaries saga, reluctance to implement measures to protect employees’ tenure of employment, skewed human resources policies and top heavy management structure.

They said the top heavy management structure was bleeding the organisation.

They said in 1999 when the parastatal moved about 12, 3 million tonnes of freight with a staff complement of 10,000 it had only one general manager and four assistant general managers.

“Now we’ve a staff complement of less than 6,000 employees and we move less than five million tonnes of freight per year yet we’ve a general manager and five directors. The structure, besides being obviously expensive to sustain, is also a cause for inefficiencies as it has unnecessary duplication of roles. This is where all the employees’ salaries are going. Let’s revert to the old structures of management”

They said they do not want to be under the leadership of acting general manager, Lewis Mukwada whom they alleged failed interviews conducted recently for the new general manager’s post at NRZ.

The workers accused the current management of being clueless on solving the issue of delayed and slashed salaries.

“Our worst fear is that management is clueless on how to resolve this challenge as far as the acting general manager‘s solution has been to issue highly provocative and empty notices.

“These special notices cannot pay our bills, cannot pay off our loans, cannot pay our rent and certainly cannot pay our children’s school fees and exam fees,” the workers said in their petition.

They said there was low staff morale at the NRZ mainly due to failure to pay salaries.

Last week, the workers began two hour demonstrations aimed at pushing for the ouster of the management which they say is failing them.

They were also demanding their salaries and allowances. The ailing parastatal owes them 11 months salaries.

Mabena last week addressed hundreds of the demonstrating workers but all was in vain.