The chickens are surely coming home to roost, as the government’s promise to pay bonuses is quickly unravelling.
Comment: NewsDay Editor
The government has once again postponed a meeting to discuss the 13th cheque and civil servants are increasingly becoming restless.
It does not help that Labour minister Prisca Mupfumira has commissioned a research into ascertaining how many government workers will prefer to be paid their bonus in kind, through the allocation of housing stands, a proposal union leaders turned down.
The government seems to be negotiating in bad faith and soon, this is going to blow up spectacularly in their faces.
Even if civil servants were to agree to be paid in stands, this proposal does not seem to be well-thought out and could be nothing more than a knee jerk approach to an entangled situation.
If the government was genuine, by now they should have revealed how much the stands would cost and where there are located, so civil servants can make an informed choice on whether they want money or land.
The government should also be in a position to say how big the stands are and how long it would take to service them, and without doing this, this is nothing, but a pie in the sky.
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It does not make sense for the government to say it is conducting research, when the population under study has no idea of what they are choosing.
The government is simply being insincere and is hoping to postpone the meeting on bonuses, without necessarily dealing with it.
It chose a populist decision instead of a pragmatic one, now it has to live with the consequences.
Bonuses are not a right and the government should have convinced its workers that it could not afford the 13th cheque, but instead, the authorities portrayed the extra payment as an entitlement.
By nature, bonuses should be paid when a corporate has met and beat its targets, not in Zimbabwe’s situation, where the government is failing to meet its revenue targets, let alone pay salaries on time.
As we have argued in the past, paying bonuses, when the country cannot even afford basics is ill-advised.
The government now has to find a way of meeting its promises, while ensuring that the country does not grind to a halt due to its short-sighted decisions.
President Robert Mugabe and his government made their bed with this myopic decision, now they must lay in it.
The government should get its priorities straight if it is to fix this country, but sadly there seems to be no appetite to right past wrongs when it comes to the economy.
