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Yeukai Karengezeka Herald Correspondent
Chitungwiza Municipality is facing a high turnover of nurses at its clinics due to its failure to adequately remunerate them.
At the centre of the nurse’s grievances is council’s failure to reinstate their professional health allowances which were withdrawn in 2012.

Some of the nurses who spoke to The Herald accused their employer of taking them for granted for a long time.
“Life has not been easy because we have not been receiving most of our allowances. We last received medical, retention, danger and uniform allowances in December 2012, yet nurses working for other local authorities are getting these allowances and they were never cut off,” said one of the nurses.

“A number of nurses have left for greener pastures and even the new recruits are resigning two or three months down the line because of these issues.

“We receive $36 for housing allowance, transport allowance $46 and electricity and water allowance $33 per month, surely who can survive on such an amount under the prevailing economy conditions.”

The council’s human resources director and acting chamber secretary Mrs Mary Mukonyora (pictured left) said council recently carried out a survey on salaries and allowances being paid by other local authorities and they are yet to deliberate on the way forward.

“We stopped giving our nurses some allowances in 2012 after we received a directive from the parent ministry to do so,” she said. “The directive also affected other employees.

“However, we recently carried out a survey on salaries and allowances for all employees and, so, now what is left is to see how best we can make adjustments because a lot of factors come into play like capacity to pay since council is currently indebted.”
Mrs Mukonyora said council nurses were actually receiving better allowances in comparison with what other local authorities were giving their workers.

As of February, the local authority had only recruited 43 nurses against a target of 80 nurses.