THERE seems to be no end in sight to the disagreements between government and it’s workers, with civil servants announcing a work stoppage to jolt government to make good on its promises of a 13th cheque.
Comment: NewsDay Editor
Yet, reality is government lacks enough resources to spare for this equally demanding task. Government has sheepishly agreed to an upward variation of doctors and nurses allowances albeit after Health minister David Parirenyatwa realised he was wrong.
On the civil servants’ issue, it is time to warn the lead negotiator, Public Service minister Priscah Mupfumira, that scaremongering, heavy-handed tactics and threats have never worked and will not work in dealing with workers anywhere in the world, and the government needs to get this through its head.
It is unfortunate that Mupfumira has become the face of government’s scowled posture, in a bid to cow desperate civil servants into abandoning their hardline stance as they demand what is due to them.
Mupfumira should be reminded that her counterpart, Parirenyatwa has tried that before and failed. Parirenyatwa is now held responsible for the unfortunate deaths of patients in hospitals across the nation, as doctors and nurses downed tools, while he fiddled with his fingers trying to scare them back to work.
This will also not work with Mupfumira, simply because it’s a beaten path from which she will surely come out battered and bruised.
Unfortunately, Zimbabwe is a complex society. Parirenyatwa in any other country would have lost his Cabinet job. But well he is the son of a national hero and can even fiddle with the lives of the majority for as long as they are poor and do not have the ear of the Dear Leader, President Robert Mugabe. Nobody can touch him!
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Civil servants may hit the streets today demanding the bonuses Mugabe promised two years ago. Once that happens, the buzzword is they are unpatriotic. Patriotism when their stomachs are empty? We dare ask!
Zimbabweans would remember that after Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa proposed the suspension of bonuses for two years in March 2015, Mugabe reversed the decision, coming short of labelling him as an “enemy of the State.”
Yet the chickens have come home to roost and Mugabe is now using Mupfumira to sell government workers a ruse by dangling non-existent residential stands.
Clever as they are, the civil servants have rejected the idea outright and have decided to use the only arsenal at their disposal — withdraw their labour.
It is regrettable that in the past two weeks, Mupfumira in order to carry favour with Mugabe instead of dialoguing, has been accused of trying to divide workers by reportedly unleashing State security apparatuses in a dodgy “survey” in which government employees are being forced to indicate if they want stands in lieu of bonuses or their cash.
Do they even have an option when these forms are thrown at them? Realising the folly of the “survey” Mupfumira now claims she has deployed “monitors” across the country. What monitors and for what? What is there to be monitored, anyway? Madam Mupfumira, you are coming from a private sector background, we suppose, but politics is a different ballgame. You will certainly not come out without bruises for your part.
It’s “jaw-jaw” and not “war-war”, that has always brought results when humans have found themselves in your situation. Whatever modicum of respect that civil servants had for you will definitely disappear like dew drops in a short period.
Fortunately, nobody can fire you, of course because there is no one to do that. Those that are supposed to do that are “always” absent-minded, absent, sleeping or flying. So you can as well continue fiddling while the country burns.
