Mongu Central UPND member of parliament Dr Mwilola Imakando has proposed a reduction in the number of civil servants to minimize expenditure on emoluments in the national budget.
Dr Imakando said in an interview that donors would be willing to fund such an exercise whose objective would be to reduce the government’s high expenditure on civil service emoluments.
“With emoluments, perhaps if we approached some donors and said ‘look, we want to cut down on the number of civil servants, can you help us pay out the packages?’ It is my firm belief that cooperating partners would assist. I know that they have done it in other countries, so if we reduce emoluments to about 35 per cent of the budget, 34 to 40 [per cent], it would give us another 10 to 15 per cent to be used on operations,” Dr Imakando said.
He called for an increase in allocation to operational funds for all provinces to enhance productivity.
“We do have a challenge with our budget structure. Our budget structure is that 50 per cent of it goes to emoluments. Now if 50 per cent goes to salaries, it means that you are only remaining with 50 per cent. Now unfortunately, we have a high debt burden…about 41 per cent goes to debt servicing. That only leaves nine per cent for what you would call operations. With nine per cent shared in the 10 provinces, it means that each province gets less than one per cent of the budget for operations, so to deal with this challenge of the budget structure, we need to deal with emoluments and we need to deal with debt servicing,” said Dr Imakando.
“Can you imagine a situation where people go to offices, they sit down and they can’t do any work because they have no operational funds and yet we pay them every month? So we are paying them to do nothing and this kills their motivation. So it is important that we address this issue of not having operational funds and one way of doing it is to reduce the number, save on that money, take it to operations.”
5 Responses
If you want get rid of all civil servants and you will save a lot of money. who That seeis my advise doctor. Who will then implement government programs and security ? Twamona ba UPND ama plan yenu keaekesha ba donor. All ready un employment is high and you open your mouth unreasonably.
He must be right but the right question will have to be asked by looking on there hand: does their service no longer needed? It somehow sounds like a populist question but we must understand that There is a huge demand for civil service than the current pool of civil servants. What if we look at ways of raising the operation fund a reduce the rate of hiring for the meantime? We need to address issues in a more holistical manner than to resort to direct route In this state of our economy.
This guy when all the government’s on earth are creating jobs in their countries him is advocating for reduction in jobs. This is backward thinking. The issue is just work out in prudent resource utilisation.
Government should reinstate the previous retirement of age of 55 years and look for funds to pay these 55 years and above. Retire the older ones to create employment opportunity for the youths.
It’s not for the government alone to create jobs in the civil service but to provide a conducive environment for other players to do so. Government simply has no money to continue supporting a bloated civil service. Our civil service is now full of political appointees with little technical know-how but expected to provide professional services to the population. We need to reorganize this service to make it efficient by removing all redundant bodies and only leaving key people capable of driving the country forward.