Business Tug of war in TNF over minimum wage

ONE of the highlights of last year’s tripartite negotiation forum (TNF) engagements was an agreement to set a US$150 minimum wage. On Friday, our senior business reporter, Freeman Makopa (FM) had a discussion with Labour and Social Welfare minister Paul Mavima (PM) on this and other pertinent issues under discussion at TNF. Here is how their discussion turned out…

FM: Zimbabwe has been losing millions of dollars to ghost workers. Have you done any audit to find out how many ghost workers are on the payroll?

PM: In a bid to move towards more sustainable fiscal management and a more effective public sector in 2018, with support from the World Bank, government implemented the public service biometric authentication project in line with the Transitional Stabilisation Programme Reforms Agenda 2018-2020.

The objective of the exercise was to ensure that the payroll includes only individuals whose existence and personal details have been verified with the National ID (NID) database.

The exercise was implemented in the context of a large public service wage bill as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and amid allegations of the existence of ghost public service employees. The exercise was undertaken in three phases. Each of the phases sought to achieve the following: Ensure all public employees on the payroll database had biometric attributes recorded in the NID database.

Define requirements for an interface that enables transactional queries from the payroll to the NID database to authenticate employees, ensure that the payroll includes only bona fide public officers; individuals whose existence and personal details have been verified with the NID database and implementation of the transactional interface between the payroll and the NID database.

In Phase 3, the programme was meant to provide independent verification of results achieved during phases 1 and 2, define options for the government to leverage biometric registration to achieve further modernisation and efficiency gains. This was finalised under the governance enhancement advisory support (P174375)…part of whose objectives were to inform the government of Zimbabwe wage bill policy.

FM: What was the next step? PM: Independent verification missions were carried out in 2021 and 2022 to verify data processes in place to maintain a clean and biometric compliant payroll.

Overall, the biometric exercise achieved its objective as 99,18 % verified public officers were found with valid biometric attributes recorded in the registrar general (RG) office NID system, and 98,99% of public officers had matching dates of birth and gender across the systems.

The few control gaps and data mismatches, which were observed were attributed to reasons including wrong formatting, missing information, and data anomalies.

FM: Will government increase civil service salaries this year?

PM: The outcomes of the negotiating platform of the national joint negotiation council (NJNC) will determine any salary increment awards for the year. Government remains committed to engaging, through the NJNC, workers’ representatives on matters of conditions of service for all its workers.

FM: Are you happy with your ministry’s allocation in the 2023 national budget?

PM: Money is a finite resource and the onus is on us to deploy what we were allocated