Daily Nation Newspaper

Govt move on work permits most welcome

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Dear Editor,

ZAMBIANS must welcome the recent pronouncem­ent in the Parliament that our Ministry of Home Affairs will now stop the automatic issuance or renewal of work permits to expatriate workers.

This is to encourage, even foreign-owned private companies, to allow qualified Zambians understudy expatriate workers so that they take over such jobs after an agreed period of a foreigner's duration of their work permits.

However, immigratio­n work permit officers should first be schooled on the importance of this exercise.

This is because that is a window of grand corruption currently, where sometimes you find semi-literate Asian workers are flooding Zambia to do jobs in private companies for which there is a glut of qualified Zambians who are currently unemployed.

I know of a private pharmaceut­ical company in Lusaka which also has a branch in Kabwe where all management workers are from India and there is no Human Resource manager.

This company just uses a retired human resource labour consultant who just visits the company once a month to pick up his cheque.

All employees are employed on two-year contract terms, to avoid paying workers' terminal benefits.

The monthly pay (paid over the table in cash) is so low that a Zambian diploma holder gets lower than the government office orderly.

The workers' complaints to the Minister of Labour over a long period have yielded nothing. Also there is no union representa­tion due to management's attitude of cancelling union leaders' contracts whenever such a move is attempted.

The human resource function is performed by an old Asian lady retired teacher, who tells off all those who are unhappy with the poor conditions to leave.

What our Home Affairs Ministry is introducin­g was done in Botswana, where many Zambian secondary school teachers used to go on contract.

When Botswana trained an adequate number of their own teachers, government simply stopped renewing contracts for the expatriate­s and the trend stopped.

If we continue renewing expatriate­s' work permits anyhow, our country will not end the mostly Asians' perpetuati­on of contract renewals.

Currently many of these people end up getting residence permits and buy land to build houses.

As is the case in the Kabwe pharmaceut­ical company I have mentioned above, the company has filled its poorly qualified relatives from Gujrat, who load it over the lowly paid locals with impunity.

If only our Immigratio­n officers' greed for corruption money is checked, this decision will be appreciate­d by all Zambians, but it has to be accepted by these officers, as there is no proof or witness to corruption since it is done in secrecy.

Kabwe resident

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