“A’looter” continua, no pay slash for Cashberts

via “A’looter” continua, no pay slash for Cashberts NewZimbabwe 29 April 2014

THE much publicised slash in salaries of CEOs and top managers running government’s loss making business entities has turned out to be a ruse after all.

It has emerged the high earning company bosses are still getting the same “elephant” salaries that shocked a poor nation when details of their remunerations were splashed in the local media.

This is despite rants and threats to end the looting of state resources camouflaged in obscene salaries by Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa.

At a press briefing last month, Chinamasa announced a drastic slash of salaries and perks of all parastatals and local authority chefs to a blanket $6,000 per month.

Chinamasa said this was going to remain in place until a cabinet committee tasked with the job of sanitising the salaries crafts an appropriate remuneration structure on a case by case basis.

He went on to say government was going to save $1,168,950 monthly if all salaries and perks for the country’s 73 out of 90 parastatal heads are slashed to $6,000 monthly.

Chinamasa said these were government’s interventions to a salary scandal that has been haemorrhaging a poor country since dollarisation 2009.

But as the proverbial English expression would rightly say, Chinamasa’s bark has turned out to be worse than his bite as the top earning elite, is seems, have earned another month’s reprieve to squeeze what remains of the carcass.

Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet, Dr Misheck Sibanda told the state controlled Herald newspaper that Cabinet was still discussing the issue and could not comment further.

“As I told you earlier, the issue is still under discussion at Cabinet and I cannot comment,” Dr Sibanda said.

Zimbabwe’s salary scandal, perhaps the biggest since independence, exploded early this year when suspended ZBC boss Happison Muchechetere’s $40 000 and, then Public Service Medical Aid Society (PSMAS) CEO, Cuthbert Dube’s $500 000-plus pays were splashed in the newspapers, igniting a public outcry in a country struggling to pay its civil servants a living wage.

The exposé opened a can of worms as it emerged immediately that a handsome $600 million was being shared among a few privileged individuals who sat on boards or were top managers of the country’s 78 parastatals and State enterprises since 2009.

Nearly $133 million was lost in 2013 alone.