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Minister Chinamasa

Yesterday Government resumed paying civil servants their December salaries with those in the education sector receiving their pay. The rest of the civil service is set to receive their salaries on time. Internal and extraneous, have led to this unhappy situation which we hope will never happen again.

The late payment of civil servants salaries was beginning to prompt restive workers to threaten strikes beginning January 1, 2016.

We acknowledge that it is within workers’ rights to petition their employer or engage in lawful actions that bring to the fore their concerns. No fair-minded person would gainsay or seek to downplay the challenges and misery that Government workers may have felt as they went for the holidays without pay and the traditional 13th cheque.

It must have been particularly hard to fail to afford the goodies that are associated with the season, especially on behalf of the children who may have scant understanding of the macroeconomics at play and innocently demand to partake of the festivities of the Christmas season.

Yesterday we carried the story of a Chinamhora boy who committed suicide because his mother could not afford to buy him new clothes for Christmas.

While this is an extreme and a rare show of consternation, it only serves as a hyperbole of the importance people attach to Christmas, and especially so children who make the bulk of the spirit and fun of Christmas.

This is why we empathise with civil servants for this forgettable historical low.

However, we would like civil servants to be patient and be alive to the challenges that the Government is facing which really spells no need for strikes and other job actions that may turn out to be counterproductive.

The Government, itself composed of civil servants as its office bearers, does not need any reminding of its obligation hence we see the frantic effort of Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa and his Labour counterpart Prisca Mupfumira to scrap the bottom of the barrel to salvage the situation.

But we should not be always scrapping the bottom of the barrel, as it were, or failing to pay at all. Government must be creative in the manner in which it gathers resources to finance its operations, including the recurrent expenditures in the form of salaries. Surely, a country with a surfeit of economists and other technocrats should be the last not to devise ways in which to fund the operations of Government. Besides, the country has an equal flux of natural resources.

Now, why on earth should we not be able to activate these human and natural resources to unlock value and wealth for our country?

It is unacceptable. We now throw the gauntlet to Cde Chinamasa and the Government at large to gather enough lessons from this embarrassing and potentially dangerous episode and see to it that Zimbabwe will never go down that miserable path again.

It should no longer be business as usual.

The ruling party, Zanu-PF, which informs Government, should also see the danger that lurks in a situation as this, especially in a year in which thousands lost their jobs due to rampant lay-offs.

These are as bad returns for a year as they come and the ruling party should naturally be worried.

We are also aware that opportunists in the opposition have been rubbing their hands in glee — as they usually do when they see people suffer — and authorities must take note.

Just yesterday, the opposition issued a statement saying; “Naturally, we will enthusiastically support the strike action that has been called by disgruntled civil servants.”

The opposition claimed that the ruling party “doesn’t give a damn about the welfare of ordinary people such as civil servants”.

Zanu-PF cannot be as maladroit as to give away such cheap political capital as this, can it?

We urge Government to pull all stops and make sure civil servants are paid by January 5, as promised, and that the sad development shall never be repeated.