Plugged onto the grid

Stephen  Mpofu
More importantly, those who pay the piper obviously wish to be serenaded with good music in the form of better-quality service.
To be sure, the pay deal has plugged the civil servants onto the grid of total commitment to duty and efficiency. Jackets often left hanging on chairs in some Government offices should now be overshadowed by busy bodies transacting the business of the day to improve Government delivery of service to this nation.

One might also say that the new salaries, modest though they are, plug the workers onto Zim Asset, or the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation as it will no doubt impact positively on payees by improving the domestic economy and social welfare of their families, which are, after all, the ultimate goal of any economic or social programme in a country — putting a smile on the shrunken faces of the people.

Teachers, in particular, have been the more vociferous of the aggrieved public servants with some of them openly telling their employer to improve their salaries so that they might also improve their quality of work in tandem with better remuneration and other conditions of service.  In the light of these grouses, it might be no exaggeration to suggest that some of the complainants may have engaged in work-to-rule as an indirect pressure on their employer to respond to their grievances.

That performances of pupils in some provinces such as Matabeleland North and probably elsewhere have been below par might be partly attributed to halfhearted delivery of service by staff protesting their meagre salaries.

The importance of teachers in the country should not only be seen in the classroom; these are the people, men and women who are responsible for producing future public servants whose quality speaks volumes about the work of the primary, secondary and the university teachers all of whom play crucial roles in shaping those clay pots into dependable utilitarian vessels.

At this point in time, the country is short of thousands of teachers whom the government through the public service is recruiting to fill vacancies so that the country maintains its reputation of good quality education and with that a top literacy spot on the African continent at 90 percent.

Zimbabwean teachers have crossed boarders to flood neighbouring states, with thousands of them in Botswana now being replaced by locals.

An attractive wage has the potential to attract those jobless teachers and many more elsewhere in the Diaspora to return to the motherland should further headway be made in negotiations to better other conditions of service in the teaching sector.  The new pay agreement will see the lowest paid civil servant getting $375, which is three quarters of the new poverty datum line they set at $505.

Teachers’ organisations had previously insisted that the least pay for their members should be above $500.  The civil servants, like any other workers, would certainly have been happier exacting more monetary rewards than they finally settled for.

Their realisation and acknowledgement of an economy far-far from affluent as something in point that persuaded them to agree the final figures must be applauded as a measure of patriotic realism.

Here are the man and women who, though hard pressed to demand more from their employer, realised that if you milk a cow to the extent of drawing blood from it you end up losing both the cow and the milk.

The civil servants have also said that educational qualifications should have a price tag on them.
Obviously separating the tree from the woods as it were and rewarding either of these accordingly is an incentive that should be taken cognisance of by any employer.

It certainly de-motivates a person who has spent money and time to improve ones-self academically to be lumped together with those less educated than himself or herself in the same scale. It is therefore to be hoped that in the continuing negotiations between civil servants and their employer those who better themselves and, consequently, the quality of their work, through study, should be rewarded for their effort.

Above all, any slovenly work should now give way to hard work commensurate with the new salary awards as a mark of appreciation to the government consideration not only for the welfare of its employees but, more importantly, for a better economy and a better Zimbabwe for all.