As predicted, the 2014 National Budget presented by Finance and Economic Development minister Patrick Chinamasa last week was just going through the motions because the minister is obliged by law to present a Budget.
NEWSDAY EDITORIAL
Nothing significant came out of it. It served to confirm the worst about the state of economic affairs.
“As MPs will recall, this budget is around the same level as that for the previous fiscal year, reflecting continued constrained fiscal space in 2014, and of this Budget, $3,32 billion, which represents 81% of total expenditures, will be on account of employment costs, leaving a balance of $798 million for operations, debt service and capital development programmes,” Chinamasa said.
“What it means basically is that we are paying people to sit in their offices and not to undertake operations, and this is a major challenge that we have to address.”
The Budget that Chinamasa presented is a damp squib. Even those with the smallest sense of economics knew that it was going to be a non-event. The whole of this year been characterised by deflation.
In economic terms, this means Zimbabwe has been at a standstill. And you cannot expect to reap much from that. That is the grim state of the nation.
It’s not only due to ruinous policies, but the hostile political environment which has severely impinged on economic activity. This means that the much-hyped ZimAsset economic blueprint is in the same state of comatose as the civil service lethargy despite the propaganda jingles on ZBC celebrating ZimAsset as up and running.
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That civil servants are being paid for doing nothing more than twiddle their fingers in their offices is no fault of their own. They have nothing useful to do while waiting for something to happen.
But politicians like Chinamasa have not played their part of making something happen. In fact, they have hampered things from happening by not providing an enabling environment to retool and reboot the economy. The economy cannot be jump-started by civil servants. The economy is prised open at the highest level; that is, the policymaking level.
Should we restate again the plain and obvious fact that politicisation has crippled the civil service where those professionals who are not cowed into behaving like Zanu PF commissars are frustrated and won’t get promoted or, at the worst, are fired?
A starting point is to cull all those thousands of “ghost workers” on the Salary Service Bureau payroll. Audits have been done to establish the numbers, but they have not been acted upon.
Then those masquerading as civil servants when they are, in fact, mere political party functionaries should be removed. They belong to Zanu PF structures and Zanu PF is not the same as the civil service.
But can we expect much when the Civil Service Commission has not shown itself as able and willing to rise to its responsibilities? It could that members of the Commission are naturally scared to step on some sensitive and powerful political toes and would rather be safe than sorry. So, until and unless the political culture in Zimbabwe is drastically changed, there is no way true professionalism can thrive in the civil service. The current poisoned political atmosphere militates against excellence and meritocracy among civil servants.
We need to look at the cause, instead of the effect of under-employed, idle civil servants. We need to establish the root cause of this state of inertia. And it the government itself. The buck stops with those in full charge: Ministers like Chinamasa himself.
But they are preoccupied with Zanu PF infighting, rendering the National Budget, like everything else — including foreign direct investment and job creation — secondary to self-serving ruling party politics.
