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CIVIL servants have given government a seven-day ultimatum to address their demands for more realistic salaries or risk a crippling strike as anger grows among government workers over promises to award incentives only to teachers.

Last week the Ministry of Education convinced teachers to return to work for the start of the second term with promises their salaries would be reviewed pending negotiations with donors.

In addition, the government promised free education for teachers’ children and undertook to encourage banks to scrap charges on teachers’ salaries while crafting a five-year benefit plan for them.
The package was agreed outside the normal negotiating forum for civil servants’ salaries, sparking protests that the government was using divide-and-rule tactics.

This provoked the rest of the civil servants whose representatives met in Harare on Friday and gave the cash-strapped government an ultimatum to review their salaries to match what was promised teachers.

“We have given the government up to May 15 to resolve the concerns from our members or face a job boycott,” Public Service Association (PSA) deputy executive secretary, Jeremiah Bvirindi said yesterday.
The PSA had earlier accused the government of trying to divide civil servants by giving teachers “special treatment” and ignoring the plight of other workers.

“We take great exception in the divide-and-rule practice by government where some sectors have decided to flout the rules of the National Joint Negotiating Council (NJNC),” the PSA said in a statement jointly signed by its president, Cecilia Alexander -Khowa and Bvirindi.

The PSA is the umbrella body of five public sector unions and represents all civil servants including non-teaching professionals. The unity government has been paying civil servants an allowance of US$100 across the board since it was installed in February.

On Workers’ Day Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said the government did not have money to meet government workers’ demands for a minimum wage of at least US$454.

But the civil servants say the concessions given to teachers show that the government is not taking their plight seriously.

“We have been patient enough in order to make the inclusive government work and be able to produce results that will be appreciated by Sadc and the world at large but it looks like the government is ignoring the machinery that is supposed to produce results for the inclusive government to succeed,” the PSA said.

The unrest in the civil service has also been fuelled by reports that Zanu PF militias and war veterans were drawing the same allowances given to government workers as reward for campaigning for President Robert Mugabe in last year’s bloody elections.

The government has launched an audit to verify the allegations. Public Service minister Eliphas Mukonoweshuro said he could not comment on the matter yesterday as he was in a meeting.

Meanwhile, Senator David Coltart, the Minister of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, says the government might have paid millions of dollars in foreign currency to ghost teachers since February.

He said an investigation led by veteran educationist and member of the education ministry’s advisory board, Isaiah Sibanda was now underway to ascertain whether 30 000 teachers on government’s payroll really exist.

“In March, my ministry launched a probe to establish the veracity of reports that there could be ghost teachers on the government payroll,” Coltart said.

“The probe was necessitated by the fact that there were some shocking figures that were presented to government by the Salaries Services Bureau (SSB).”

Coltart said in February alone, the SSB had paid out US$100 allowances to about 94 000 teachers.
“When this figure was presented to us, we quickly checked with teacher unions and we were given a figure of slightly more than 60 000 teachers.

“Given these details, our probe team is now tasked with finding out where the extra 30 000 plus teachers could be and whether these figures are cooked up,” he said.

But the investigations have been hampered by the fact that the ministry’s records are not computerised, which means that records will be verified manually. Coltart said a full report on the audit could be ready by mid-month and his ministry would immediately act on the findings.

“The biggest challenge is that we have a very big education infrastructure in the country. That infrastructure does not have any teachers in it,” Coltart said. “For instance, out of the infrastructure we have as a country, only 32% of it is occupied by teaching staff. The other 68% is vacant.”

Source: www.thezimbabwestandard

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