Junior officers mass meeting tomorrow
MANZINI – Junior officers from both His Majesty’s Correctional Services (HMCS) and Royal Eswatini Police Service (REPS) will have a mass meeting tomorrow.
The agenda of the meeting, it has been gathered, is a way forward following the pronouncement by the Minister of Public Service, Mabulala Maseko, that the lowlyranked officers shall be awarded four per cent of their annual salary, backdated to April 2022.
This four per cent, according to Maseko, shall be effected in January 2023.
However, Maseko’s announcement has not been received well by the junior officers, who have threatened to engage other tactics for their grievances to be heard by the administration.
Some of the junior officers have in their platform expressed discontent on the reasoning behind the award of the four per cent, as they have claimed that it was not negotiated by them.
The officers also claimed that they had raised concern in the past months of what was a move to award them three per cent and wondered when the meeting wherein they consented to the new offer by the minister of Public Service held.
The junior officers claimed that they were concerned about the manner in which they were being treated as they were an essential service, which guaranteed peace in the kingdom. “The people who should be eager to listen to us are ignoring our concerns while we are the ones who guard them,” said one officer. The officer claimed that the four per cent ,which was extended by the administration, was something they did not negotiate but was imposed on them.
The lowly-ranked officers further questioned what scientific motivation of the four per cent was, given that their superiors started benefitting from the salary restructuring exercise in 2014.
They claimed that government should have at least backdated the four per cent by eight years other than to impose it on them without the consideration of the financial challenges they had endured since 2014.
They claimed that the cost of living was similar for every individual and did not understand why they were being treated differently.
Meanwhile, Royal Eswatini Police Staff Association (REPOSA) Secretary General (SG) Sergeant Dumisile Khumalo, confirmed the mass meeting. She said the junior officers ordered them to take a backseat; so that they could deal with their challenges on their own.
Khumalo said what she had gathered was that the officers, through both staff associations, would be expressing their position to the minister in writing, after the meeting.
It is worth noting that last weekend, the controversial Phase II of the salary restructuring exercise, which lowly-ranked law enforcers are seeking its implementation, became a prayer item.
This is because junior officers from HMCS and those from the REPS hosted a prayer session, seeking divine intervention on their challenge. The junior officers have since 2014 been anticipating the implementation of the salary restructuring exercise, which created a gap between them and their leaders of E45 503.34 as the National Commissioner (NATCOM) of Police, William Tsitsibala Dlamini and the Commissioner General (COMGEN) of HMCS, Phindile Lomakhosini Dlamini, both have a basic salary of E54 823.50.