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THE government’s efforts to attain gender balance in the civil service is being hampered by the unwillingness of female civil servants to take up senior positions that are away from their families, lawmakers heard yesterday.Civil Service Commission deputy commissioner, Steven Ngwenya, said they had invited female civil servants for interviews for vacant senior posts but most of them developed cold feet once they heard they would be relocated to a different place from their spouses.
Ngwenya was giving oral evidence before the parliamentary portfolio committee on Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development who wanted to know what the commission was doing to attain gender balance in the service as required by the new Constitution.
“Most senior positions in the civil service are in Harare, but most of the female applicants don’t want to come to Harare. We had a case of a Chief Accountant where the lady who came said ‘unless you create that post in Bulawayo, I will not come. I will not leave my family’. But that has not deterred us from empowering women,” said Ngwenya.
He gave other examples where they wanted to make a senior appointment in Beitbridge and other areas but the female candidates declined to go, saying they could not leave their spouses.
In making promotions, he said, they preferred women in circumstances where both men and women would have scored equal points or had the same qualifications.
“If the woman does not qualify, we don’t promote her. We don’t just promote for the sake of it because it’s not good for her and it’s not good for the country,” he said.
Ngwenya said each time there was a promotion to be made in one ministry, for example, a committee to be constituted by personnel from other ministries sits to interview the applicants. This, he said, was part of measures to enhance transparency by not leaving a single person to make a decision.
He said there were about 145,000 female civil servants, against 135,000 men.
Turning to the conditions of service for civil servants, Ngwenya said the introduction of five percent hardship allowance for those in the rural areas would go a long way in motivating them to work in remote places of the country.
Committee chairperson and Goromonzi West MP, Cde Beata Nyamupinga (Zanu-PF), expressed concern at the pace at which the civil service was aligning the law with the new constitution. This was after Ngwenya had indicated that their legal department was still working on the alignment of laws. Ngwenya, however, said great work had now been covered and what remained was to submit to the responsible minister for his consideration.
He said there were 29 permanent secretaries for ministries, and of that 20 were males while nine were females.
Civil Service Commission secretary, Pretty Sunguro, also attended yesterday’s hearing.
Online Reporter