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Government on Monday met civil servants’ representatives where it assured its workers that the issue of July salary dates would be finalised next week.
At the risk of repeating ourselves and we believe the risk is worth taking, we want to commend the parties for sitting around the table to discuss their differences and concerns. We believe that nothing beats honest dialogue.
Civil servants in the past few weeks have raised concerns that Government was not treating them with the respect they deserved. They said more often than not, instead of direct engagement and open consultation, they were informed of salary delays through the newspapers without advance notice to allow them, if possible, to make contingent plans in respect of monthly obligations.
It is this respect that we applaud the decision by Government to place all the cards on the table in respect to civil servants’ salary payment dates. Besides the certainty of knowing when they will be paid, openness engenders a spirit of trust and mutual respect.
We are not living in the best of times. The economy is not performing. As a result, Government revenues have been shrinking, creating the current bottlenecks in the payment system. What all this amounts to is that there won’t be a quick fix. And that is where political opportunists of all hues seem to have smelt blood.
People of unknown backgrounds and questionable motives have taken to social media to spread all sorts of malicious rumours about an economic collapse and political implosion. Of late this has been accompanied by threats of mass action to make the country ungovernable and quicken the apocalypse.
Most of the agitators have no constituency of their own. They have no constructive agenda to attract a following and have no plan about what they want to do after the strike, stay away or mass action. They are no more than agents of anarchy.
It is in this respect that they have sought to co-opt civil servants into their ill-defined agenda to give their ill-defined actions the appearance of mass appeal. To do this, they have attempted to tap into the frustration of civil servants over delays in the payment of their monthly salaries, to have them join their evil causes.
Only this week, there were reports that Government was on a witch-hunt for those allegedly behind the civil servants’ collective job action last week. Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa challenged those with such information to produce it. Needless to say no such information will be brought forward.
Government and its workers can only thwart and shame these plotters and their evil machinations by keeping an open mind and maintaining constructive dialogue. The current economic conditions will not last forever although others would want them to endure so they can use them as a campaign tool as the nation heads towards elections in 2018.
The truth, besides sanctions imposed on the country by the West, is that the economic situation has been aggravated by erratic rains in the past agricultural season. As a result, already limited revenues are having to be spread thin to meet food requirements across the country.
While this should be a situation challenging leaders across the political divide to feel sympathy for ordinary workers, in Zimbabwe we have developed an unfortunate culture where people’s suffering is taken as sunshine in which to make one’s political hay.
Meanwhile, we want to believe that Government is doing everything in its power to mobilise whatever resources are possible to meet its salary obligations to civil servants. Hungry people are not only angry people, but they are also susceptible to manipulation by both local and external forces pursuant to their regime change agenda. They should not be given a chance.
Online Reporter