Zimpapers Logo

Minister Chinamasa

The government’s move to cut salaries and perks for parastatals and local authorities bosses to $6,000 per month pending finalisation of a comprehensive salary structure is highly commendable. A Cabinet Committee on State Enterprises and Parastatals Development is crafting the salary structure.

The move to reduce salaries and perks of the 73 out of 90 parastatal heads who were earning  more than $6,000 monthly, will save about $1,2 million a month which is enough to pay at least 3,000 civil servants.

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the government agreed with the public that packages previously paid out to CEOs of parastatals and government enterprises as well as local authority bosses were unjustified and bordered on the obscenity and corruption hence the move to address the anomaly. It is such decisive move by the government which restores public confidence. When the government and the media embarked on a crusade to expose obscene salaries, the move was dismissed by prophets of doom as mere rhetoric.

The story is obviously different today following the move by government to address the issue of outrageous salaries which have been bleeding parastatals, state enterprises and local authorities. The move might sound too punitive but the bosses deserve it because they are the ones to blame for coming up with salaries and perks that were totally divorced from the country’s economic realities. What is mind boggling is that the same bosses who were paying themselves such hefty salaries, were paying ordinary workers salaries way below the Poverty Datum Line.

In some cases these bosses continued to pay themselves the huge perks despite the fact that the rest of the workers were not being paid salaries. It was immoral on the part of such bosses to make other employees work on empty stomachs while they enjoyed perks under the guise that they too were not receiving salaries.

The government’s move to only slash salaries, it has to be appreciated, is very lenient given the figures the bosses were paying themselves despite the fact that the country is battling to turn around the economy. The most logical decision would have been to make the bosses pay back some of the money they paid themselves as salaries and perks but we believe government realised that this was not feasible.

What is shocking is that local authorities including very small councils such as Plumtree town council had joined the bandwagon of paying senior managers obscene salaries. What this means is that the little revenue the councils were collecting was going towards salaries at the expense of service delivery.

The slashing of salaries should therefore translate to increased resources for service delivery for most of the councils. The move to put a lid on salaries paid to bosses should be extended to the private sector where general workers are also earning way below the PDL while their bosses are earning outrageously high salaries and perks.

We want to once again urge government to continue with its clean up exercise until sanity is restored in the way the different state enterprises and local authorities do business.

A system should be put in place to constantly monitor operations of government enterprises and councils so that corrupt tendencies are nipped in the bud.