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Farirai Machivenyika-Senior Reporter 

Parliament will next year carry out a restructuring exercise for its staff including adoption of Artificial Intelligence as part of measures to improve the welfare of its workers, Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda has said.

The Speaker said this on Friday during a ceremony to honour its long serving employees.

“As Speaker, working together with fellow presiding officers, we want to implement the institutional, structural reforms guided by the Patterson System, where we need to do proper job evaluation, where we need to do proper job specification, where we need to do appropriate job descriptions and in tandem with that the remuneration scales will be decided accordingly. Currently the structure is disadvantaging the majority of you,” he said.

The Patterson System grades jobs based on the level and complexity of decisions made by each job. 

The decision bands range from A to F, with F the highest decision band.

Advocate Mudenda said it was important that Parliament be able to learn and compare with other jurisdictions and see where they stand as an institution. 

So, accordingly the staff regulations are going to be overhauled to the advantage of the staff,” he said. 

“The restructuring means that our ICT department will have to move a scale up and embrace artificial intelligence (AI). We are now in the era of industrial revolution anchored on information, communication technology that is now going to be guided by AI so it will mean that every department will have to be ICT compliant, every department will have to be AI compliant.”

He added that with the adoption of AI it will make research easier.

The beauty of AI is that you don’t have to rely on the research, you just touch screen and it will give you all the data that you require and the biggest problem will be how to synthesise the data which is relevant to what you are looking for, so every department will be enjoying the fruits of ICT and AI,” he said. 

Advocate Mudenda said some members of Parliament staff would be sent to Dubai to study at the Zayed University of AI.

“I want us to send representatives there apart from MPs so that we can understand this transformation which will be very revolutionary in terms of our work ethics,” he said.

He also said Parliament would next year introduce an education fund so that those who want to improve themselves are facilitated through that fund.