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Herald Reporter—
Government efforts to attain gender balance in the civil service are being hampered by the unwillingness of female civil servants to take up senior positions that take  them away from their families, legislators heard yesterday. Civil Service Commission deputy commissioner Mr 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 different places from their spouses.

Mr Ngwenya was giving oral evidence before a parliamentary portfolio committee on Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development which 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 do not 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 Mr Ngwenya.

He gave other examples where they wanted to make a senior appointment in Beitbridge and other areas but female candidates declined.
In making promotions, he said, they preferred women in circumstances where both male and women would have scored equal points or had the same qualifications.

“If the woman does not qualify, we do not promote her. We do not just promote for the sake of it because it is not good for her and it is not good for the country,” he said.

Mr 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 should sit 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 was a discrepancy of 10 000 on the number of male civil servants against their female counterparts as they were about 145 000 female civil servants against 135 000.

Turning to the conditions of service for civil servants, Mr Ngwenya said the introduction of 5 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 in respect of their platform to the new constitution.

This was after Mr Ngwenya had indicated that their legal department was still working on the alignment of laws.
Mr Ngwenya, however, said great work had now been covered and what remained was to submit to the responsible minister for his consideration.

He said they were 29 permanent secretaries for ministries and out of that 20 were males, while nine were females.
Civil Service Commission secretary, Mrs Pretty Sunguro also attended yesterday’s hearing.