via Chinamasa clueless on cutting govt wage bill – NewsDay Zimbabwe 20 December 2014 by Veneranda Langa
FINANCE Minister Patrick Chinamasa yesterday disclosed to Senate he had no idea how he was going to cut the wage bill gobbling 85% of the country’s National Budget.
“In the first instance we may need to do an audit of how many people are employed in the civil service, their productivity, their qualifications, what they are supposed to do — but obviously that process will take a long time.”
Chinamasa said he had asked the World Bank for ideas on how to cut the wage bill, but allegedly they also did not have any.
“The establishment in the civil service is huge and the bulk of
140 000 are teachers. I would not want to touch this sector. We want to maintain our position as a leader in literacy and education. Human capital is the biggest resource in Zimbabwe and not diamonds or gold,” he said.
Senator Chief Chisunga said Chinamasa should consider revising the workforce. He said there were some ministries like Youth, Indigenisation and Empowerment that were allegedly employing people without the requisite five “O” levels.
“We should consider retiring some of the civil servants. This would help us save money which we can use to allocate to those ministries that are underfunded,” Chief Chiduku said.
Meanwhile, Chinamasa said his ministry was going to consider taking items like blankets and clothes forfeited at border posts as smuggled goods and dish them out to old people and the impoverished.
This was after Matabeleland South senator Sithembile Mlotshwa had criticised government for failing to allocate adequate funds to the social services department.
“Currently we have a lot of forfeited blankets and goods that were being smuggled. I think we should take some of those goods and put them towards meeting welfare issues,” Chinamasa said.
Senators also questioned why Chinamasa allocated a paltry
$19 million to Parliament saying they were tired of being embarrassed at hotels where they were kicked out for failure to pay bills.
“Some of the expenditure from the Seventh Parliament was not paid and MPs should not look like beggars,” said Harare Metropolitan senator James Makore.
Chinamasa said he had approached developing partners to fund some of the Parliament projects.
COMMENTS
Good Luck Comrade!! With all the vendors around you won’t be collecting duty as well as vat from all of them. So we are becoming a nation of vendors, for the chinese goods. Makorokoto.
He is both clueless and powerless. He dances to the tune of the corrupt thieves in Zanu PF, and he is one of them.
If all he thinks about is cuttin the wage bill,then he is in big trouble.i dare him to fire the whole civil service but he will still cry over money.this is because he is surrounded by looters,he has scared investors,presided over the return of a useless currency,shut down of industries,grabbing farms like7 per person.that is the problem.very soon you will fail to even pay your army ,mps,chiefs at least you friends are covered .they stole a long time ago.
Wow our wonderful highly paid finance minister has no clue how to reduce our civil service.Then how can we expect him to fix the economy.He should resign and admit failure.But he won’t ,there heads are so far in the troughs that they can’t see anything else.African politics takes generations to fix.Everyone knows what has to be done ,but know one is prepared to do it.The old Zimbabwean saying ,maybe next year will be better.It never does get better.Zimbabweans deserve much better but unfortunately we are light years behind most countries.The next few years are going to be hell.The writing is on the wall.