SW Radio Africa
By Lance Guma
11 May 2009
A week after the Ministry of Education averted a teachers strike by promising various incentives, civil service unions have issued a 7 day ultimatum to the government to also review their US$100 monthly allowances. Teachers were promised a review of their salaries, free education for their children and exemption from bank charges, among other benefits. The civil service unions are however unhappy at what they feel is a divide and rule tactic and say these concessions were made outside the normal negotiating forum for civil servants.
According to the Zimbabwe Standard weekly newspaper, civil servants representatives met in Harare on Friday and demanded a review of their salaries, in line with what the teachers have been promised. Jeremiah Bvindiri, the Deputy Executive Secretary of the Public Service Association (PSA), said they had given the government up to the 15th May to resolve their concerns, or face a job boycott. ‘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,’ the PSA said in a statement.
Interestingly, under sole ZANU PF rule the PSA has not led many general strikes against the government. Commentators have pointed out that the sudden willingness to strike, over allowances that are considerably better than what they used to earn before, could be construed as an attempt to undermine the MDC who are in charge of the Finance, Education and Civil Service Ministries. The same union kept quite during the days of trillion-percentage inflation for many, many months, before the unity government was in place. It has been suggested that after failing to manipulate teachers to go on strike last week, ZANU PF has now turned its attention to the civil service.
The re-opening of some schools, hospitals, gold mines, and the payment of US$100 monthly allowances to civil servants, have been viewed as some of the few successes of the coalition and critics believe Mugabe is trying to undermine all of this in his turf war with Tsvangirai. But the PSA, which is the umbrella body of all five public sector unions, tried to untangle themselves from this allegation by insisting they have been patient enough in waiting for the coalition government to work. In their statement they said they felt the coalition ‘is ignoring the machinery that is supposed to produce results.’
In another sign of the mess that has been created by ZANU PF, Senator David Coltart, the Education Minister, has expressed fears that millions of dollars worth of foreign currency may have been lost paying ghost teachers since February this year. Coltart said they have launched a probe which was necessitated by the fact that there were some shocking figures presented to government by the Salaries Services Bureau. They paid out US$100 allowances to 94 000 teachers, and yet teachers unions said they had around 60 000 members.