The government has introduced a new policy guideline aimed at slashing hefty salaries earned by heads of parastatals and State enterprises from around $10 000 per month to between $3 000 and $5 000, a Cabinet minister has said.
Parastatals and State Enterprises minister Gorden Moyo told NewsDay guidelines have already been drawn up and forwarded to line ministries for implementation.
We have come up with a formula for those who hold designated posts such as chief executives or managing directors, which look at reasonability of the salary, sustainability, affordability and comparability with similar positions in local authorities, private sector and similar entities in the region, he said.
In fact, we carried out a salaries survey in the region and we discovered on average top executives get paid between $3 000 and $5 000 per month and this is what we expect here.
Anything beyond that has to be justified looking at the parastatals balance sheets and there are few which can boast of balance sheets that have the wherewithal to sustain salaries beyond that.
We had a situation where some chief executives were being paid very high salaries, yet producing nothing.
Moyo said salaries of heads of parastatals and State enterprises recommended by boards should be approved by line ministries.
He said if they have been awarding themselves salaries without the line ministers approval, that is illegal.
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In the past two years, there has been an outcry that executives of State entities were getting huge salaries at the expense of the rest of the labour force yet the companies were struggling to survive and being bailed out by the government.
Over the years, the public entities have been decaying; there has been a culture of kleptocracy, adhocracy that is doing unplanned things, and stealing. In fact, corruption became the norm and we are not going to allow this to happen, Moyo said.
