Unpaid council salaries blamed on govt

COUNCIL workers have gone unpaid for six months because of failure by Government to disburse the Local Government equalisation funds, Fire Services Union of Zambia has said.

Union general secretary Clement Mulenga said that councils heavily depend on equalisation fund because they do not have enough revenue sources to sustain their operations.

“As Fire Services Union of Zambia, we are extremely saddened by the Governments failure to disburse the Local Government equalisation for four months now. This has led to the local authorities’ failure to pay salaries.

Salary arrears are now ranging from two to six months,” he said.

Mr Mulenga said the union was disappointed that leaders were failing to tell the nation the truth regarding the challenges the local authorities were facing.

Chipata Mayor Sinoya Mwale was on record, he said, misleading the nation that none payment of salaries was due to over staffing by the Local Government Service Commission.

Mr Mulenga said such statements were baseless and lack the truth.

“His Worship the Mayor should not blame the innocent Local Government Service Commission for bloating the workforce when it is the councils that have over recruited division 4s. The Auditor General’s report is very clear that the Local Government Service Commission actually under recruited the staff from 2015 to 2017.

The Commission is only responsible for employing division 1-3 who are not bloated at all. The Worship was very excited to declare Chipata a city not knowing that certain functions were to be added and would off course attract some officers,” he said.

Mr Mulenga in a statement said the union would not keep quiet seeing leaders who were supposed to find lasting solutions to the challenges workers were facing lie about the plight of workers.

And Mr Mulenga called on the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU) to take up the cost of deflooding parts of Lusaka as opposed to throwing the burden to the Lusaka City Council. He said the council should be relieved because the workers had not been paid and the union would not allow workers’ salaries being channeled to de-flooding the city.