adminTheir anger is understandable. Workers have not been paid this year, although since the new temporary team was only appointed at the end of January, this lack of pay is in many ways a symptom of the administrative collapse that caused Local Government, Rural and Urban Development Minister Ignatius Chombo, to appoint the team in the first place.
The team, chaired by Mr Fungai Mbetsa, has announced cuts in staff allowances to more sustainable levels, something that might be necessary but which is not going to make the workers love them.
But what has triggered white-hot anger are the fees and allowances the team members are receiving. Minister Chombo has set the fees: US$12 000 a month for the chairman, US$11 000 a month for the vice chairman and US$10 000 a month for committee members.
We believe the fees Minister Chombo set are adequate. Chitungwiza Municipality is ailing and worse still it has a small revenue base compared to say Harare or other satellite towns such as Norton.
There are not many commercial and industrial ratepayers in Chitungwiza and Minister Chombo’s fees were fair. The town’s revenue base is thin because it has no Borrowdale,
Borrowdale Brooke, Glen Lorne, a vibrant central business district or suburban shopping malls such as Sam Levy Village and Westgate. Chitungwiza is predominantly a high-density ratepayers’ town and the committee should make do with what the Minister prescribed.
The fees Minister Chombo set meet market requirements even by private sector requirements let alone given the financial dire straits the municipality is in. We understand the committee is made up of professionals who are paid rates commensurate with their expertise.
But the fees Minister Chombo sets for such committees which he has appointed to fix a number of wobbly local authorities should be enough.
No other allowances should be paid on top of what the Minister directs councils to pay the resuscitation teams. We are confident the Minister will never be short of appointees to these committees even if some of the professionals were to turn down the appointments on the basis of remuneration.
The Chitungwiza team had started well by cutting the salary bill by US$800 000 while restoring service delivery. Residents expect it to reduce the workforce to levels council can manage and afford.
If the committee had queries over the fees set by the Minister, it should have gone back to the appointing authority. It is easy to argue that since the contract is for only three
months, these sort of professional fees can be justified. It is also just as easy to argue that they are too high, and unaffordable. The expansion of the team from five to seven members tends to strengthen the second argument.
It can also be argued that many of the professionals needed could have been seconded from the Public Service, just as it is easy to argue that outsiders with a private-sector background were needed to bring a businesslike approach to Chitungwiza’s problems.
But the point is, these fees were set by an outsider, hopefully after taking advice and surveying the sort of fees good consultants now earn. The Minister might be right, he
might be wrong. But he is not unreasonable and he is accountable to Parliament for his decisions. So at the very least he will make sure he can defend his actions and decisions.
What is difficult to understand is that over the last six weeks the team members appear to have acquired a lot of extra allowances that more than double their incomes, with these allowances not set by the Minister and not made public before now.
There is a feeling that the doctors are catching the same disease they are supposed to cure, especially as some of the allowances seem far higher than the expenses they are supposed to meet. In other words the allowances are raising the fees way beyond the Minister’s limits. There obviously is a case for some expenses incurred by team members to be met by Chitungwiza, but these should be reimbursements paid on receipts for purposes approved in advance by the Minister.
The same system that was used to set the fees, with the Minister, an outsider, setting them in advance and unable to benefit personally, must govern what sort of expenses can be claimed against receipts or invoices.
We are also troubled by the expansion of the team to seven members, to include two with a legal background. Most of the legal decisions that the team has to take concern financial matters, which the accountancy types should already know about, or labour matters.
Surely, it would be cheaper to have lawyers on tap for any legal advice, paying them for the modest number of hours each month they are actually needed, rather than have them actually on the team?
We hope the Minister, who appears already to have been justified in taking action, will monitor how his “doctors” are behaving and will take further action if he finds them even starting to look at being infected with the diseases he wants them to cure.
Online Reporter
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