Public Service Minister Eliphas Mukonoweshuro is the guest on Question Time. He joins SW Radio Africa journalist Lance Guma to respond to various listener’s questions, including the confusion over the civil servants salaries and the long awaited civil service audit which exposed the fact that 75,000 ghost workers are milking the treasury of US$20 million every month. Why has the audit taken so long to be dealt with by cabinet?
Interview broadcast 06 July 2011
Lance Guma: Public Service Minister Eliphas Mukonoweshuro is my guest on Question Time. With the civil service pay hike debate taking centre stage, listeners sent in their questions in advance of the interview using Facebook, Twitter, Skype, e-mail and text messages. Professor Mukonoweshuro thank you for joining us.
Eliphas Mukonoweshuro: Thank you very much.
Guma: You are being quoted as saying last week’s announcement that salaries of the lowest paid state workers would rise to US$253 a month was baseless, irresponsible and intended to cause political friction. Let’s start with that – what’s happening?
Mukonoweshuro: Well in the first place there was no official announcement. What was announced was a leaked, a leakage from the negotiating process by people who are not authorized to disclose that to either their members or members of the public.
The process of the NJNC (National Joint Negotiating Council) negotiations is well known. The leaders of the staff associations and representatives of government sit around a table under the chairmanship of an independent or neutral person. They deliberate; they agree or disagree; the result of that deliberation is sent to me. It arrives on my desk, not as a result that cannot be tampered with; it arrives at my desk as a recommendation from the NJNC.
My responsibility would then be to take that recommendation to government. Cabinet will receive that recommendation and then in its own wisdom, cabinet can vary it and increase it. Once that is done, I will then make an announcement on behalf of government and that announcement becomes the binding resolution.
Guma: Okay now Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF are painting the MDC as the main obstacle in giving civil servants a salary increase. They even staged a demonstration against Finance Minister Tendai Biti. Now as the MDC you seem to have walked right into the ZANU PF trap and they are milking political mileage from this situation.
Mukonoweshuro: They are not milking any political mileage and we have not walked into a minefield. We have operated in good faith. One of the cornerstones of my responsibility is to improve the salaries and conditions of service of the civil servants. In order to stop the brain drain, retain civil servants who are in post and attract those who have gone for greener pastures and this is what I’ve been trying to do and if anybody thinks that this country can operate with a civil service that is disgruntled, a civil service that is under qualified, if anybody in their honest opinion and think that that can happen then they must be dreaming.
So that has been the position taken by the MDC and it is important to ensure that we have a strong, efficient and effective civil service. And I might add that this round of negotiations was agreed to between us in government and the civil servants in March that we should then meet in June and review and see the extent to which we can satisfy ourselves whether the remuneration levels need an increment and if so, by what percentage. And this is what we agreed.
Guma: Now you said the joint negotiating council does not have the authority to make such announcements and it’s your responsibility as Public Service minister, so is this whole thing, the way it has turned out, is it not being stage managed to deliver on a promise made by Mugabe?
Mukonoweshuro: To deliver a what?
Guma: To deliver on a promise made by Mugabe. Mugabe made the promise that civil servants would get a salary increase and you are just telling us the…
Mukonoweshuro: I would, I would say so. Let those who have made that announcement answer that question but what I want to tell you is that what happened last week was highly irregular and unprecedented. Leaders of the staff associations have no right to leak information of a confidential nature that came straight from the table of the NJNC (National Joint Negotiating Council).
It has never happened before and I hope that when the dust has settled we should be able to look at this and decide how we proceed to ensure that in future deliberations of this nature are not prematurely leaked to the detriment of the entire process.
Guma: Now the problem that is there now as Tendai Chikowore, the chairwoman of the Apex Council is insisting that the deal that she announced last week is binding and to quote her words she is saying – “we agreed with government representatives on the pay increase.”
Mukonoweshuro: It’s unfortunate that she made such a definitive statement because she knows that she is not entitled to pride herself on being the first one to leak such sensitive information. No leader of the staff association has got the right or is authorized to leak information of such a nature and I don’t know how, even if they leak it, if I don’t in actual fact follow the procedures how are they going to implement it?
I can understand the frustration of the Minister of Finance when asked he says he doesn’t know about it. Of course he is right. He could only know about it if he had heard cabinet being addressed by the minister of the Public Service but otherwise he would not know about it from irresponsible leaks like the one you have just referred to.
Guma: There are many who are making the point that before any pay increases are offered the over 75000 reported ghost workers on the government payroll must be removed. Levi Mhaka sent in a question asking why does the minister require cabinet approval to undertake an administrative duty of cleaning up the payroll and he says there are two types of ghost workers – those who don’t exist at all and those who are not supposed to be there. And his other question is has he dealt with the first – that is those who don’t exist at all?
Mukonoweshuro: You see that question is, comes from the right mind but it’s unfortunately misguided. You see the minister does not require, the minister is required to inform and obtain the concurrence of the principals, the three principals for each and every step he has to take in order to remove these people from the payroll.
And that obviously adds to the inordinate delays which government bureaucracy is well known for. So we are moving with the greatest of speed possible and right now we have got an inter ministerial committee whose work is at an advanced stage and I think before August we should be able to say this many civil servants cannot remain on the payroll.
Guma: Exiled journalist Makusha Mugabe who is the editor of the changezimabawe.com web site sends in a question saying it’s almost a year since you submitted the civil service audit report to cabinet, why is it taking so long to sort out?
Mukonoweshuro: Well you see if I had the response to that question I would have given it to you and the public and to Makusha Mugabe a long time ago. To me that is a question that should be asked elsewhere, but what I know is that I am required to ensure that each and every step that we’ve taken has got the approval of all the principals.
Yes it has taken a year but a year is not very long. There are some countries which are in their tenth year, fifteenth year doing the audit; there are countries around us which have abandoned the audit because of the sheer weight of the contradictions that they tread on as they started to unravel the irregularities in the audit.
Guma: Finance Minister Tendai Biti has come out saying salaries cannot be increased until more is known about the distribution of revenues from the controversial mining of diamonds in Marange and the fate of the estimated 75000 ghost civil servants. Now this sounds like a standoff within the coalition government and the workers are suffering because of it. This seems to be the view of most of our listeners, would you agree?
Mukonoweshuro: Well I cannot answer for the first one. The first one Tendai Biti and Obert Mpofu; Finance minister and minister of Mines and Mining Development respectively. Those are the ones who know where the problem is. But for 60 000 ghost workers, what I can say is everything is being done to ensure that very soon, they will be off the kit. They cannot continue to suck for no benefit to Zimbabwe.
Guma: Paddington Zhanda who is the Parliamentary Budget Committee chairperson is already suggesting that the government will have to pass a supplementary budget to meet the cost of the wage increases despite what you are saying are the current financial problems. How would you react to his suggestion?
Mukonoweshuro: Well it’s standard procedure isn’t it? When government asks for more money they don’t have to draw it from the hat, they just have to use a procedure which is open and transparent to the government. You need a supplementary budget but again that is not for me to comment; that is for my colleague, the minister of Finance.
Guma: While the government is saying it does not have money to fund these increases for these wage increases, there are many who accuse top government officials of spending large sums of money traveling abroad. Do you think this is one of the challenges you face as Public Service Minister to communicate your stance properly with accusations like this where people do not buy the line that the government is broke?
Mukonoweshuro: Well it’s very difficult for me to really answer that question in an effective and imaginative way because the budgetary allocation, the whole government line items of expenditure is not my responsibility; it is the responsibility of my colleague, the minister of Finance. And he is the one who is eminently qualified to comment on the activities in that budget line item dedicated to travel. It would be improper for me to try to tread into a portfolio that is allocated to a colleague.
Guma: Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has already expressed dismay over the announced pay increases, arguing that they are well below the official poverty datum line. Now there are obviously a lot of civil servants listening to this interview so already even in terms of what has been negotiated, the PM has even acknowledged that it’s below the poverty datum line. What can you say to civil servants listening in? Is it a promising picture?
Mukonoweshuro: I will say to the civil servants – look at what your staff association leaders are doing and the trouble they are causing, the unnecessary trouble. The prime minister is reacting to that because the prime minister has not been informed. The procedure as I said in the beginning is that the prime minister and the president and the deputy prime minister as the three principals would have been informed first and then cabinet, the ministers in cabinet second and then we would debate on these issues, adjust the figures if need be and then we go and announce in conjunction of course with consultations with leaders of the public service staff associations.
Now this whole exercise has been short circuited by some who are trigger-happy; some who were so impatient that they wanted to leak raw information before it was even fully processed and this is why you get the prime minister expressing surprise because for all these months, it’s what we have been negotiating about because he has not been informed. He should have been informed and he shall be informed. He could have been told that the reasons why this is like this and not like that. So they can only have their own leaders to blame.
Guma: But does this short circuiting by these union leaders, will that affect the process? What happens from here? Raw information which had been finalized has been leaked so does that compromise the whole process or you are still going ahead?
Mukonoweshuro: It doesn’t compromise the whole process; I’m not trying to pass the buck, I’m simply expressing my disappointment in that man and women of such professional standards could breach a standing rule and regulation that have been time honoured and that has served us well. Of course we are not going to stop. I’m still going to go to cabinet, I’m still going to go to the principals and I will brief them.
I’m not going to broadcast substantive figures at the present moment but I am going to my principals and I’m going to brief them on where we are and what recommendation I have now received from the chairman of the NJNC (National Joint Negotiating Council) so we can conclude the process. I’m not trying to pass the buck at all; I’m just expressing my displeasure and also appealing to the union leaders that perhaps in future it will serve our purpose well if we were to observe the rules and regulations that we made to bind ourselves.
Guma: Well Zimbabwe, that’s the Public Service Minister Eliphas Mukonoweshuro joining us on this edition of Question Time to discuss the civil service pay hike debate which is taking centre stage in Zimbabwe at the moment. Professor Mukonoweshuro thank you so much for your time.
Mukonoweshuro: Thank you.
To listen to the programme:
http://swradioafrica.streamuk.com/swradioafrica_archive/qt060711.wma
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