THE UNIMPLEMENTED PAYROLL AUDIT CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE GOVERNMENT AS IT SEEKS TO REDUCE PERSONNEL EXPENDITURE.

 RETENCHMENTS,WAGE FREEZES  vs REMOVAL OF HANGERS ON AND DEAD WOOD

THE ELUSIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PAYROLL AUDIT

 

Picture: Times of Eswatini

Long before the Mandvulo Dlamini headed government took office in 2018  the government had engaged a consultant to conduct a salary review, a job grading and an audit of the payroll and skills  for civil  servants.

In the launch occasion of  the payroll and skills audit, in 2013, the Prime Minister Barnabas Sibusiso Dlamini had, in his speech,  estimated that they needed to reduce the civil service by around 7000 civil servants in order to ensure that the civil service was the right size and cost to the fiscus. He also mentioned that the salary freeze and the hiring freeze had not produced the desired results of substantially reducing expenditure on wages by the government.    

The first two parts of the process, namely the salary review and the job grading, were implemented a few years later. Noted then was the fact that, it took longer to conclude the  personnel audits probably because of the nature of these processes. In the end it had been found reported publicly that there were over 3000 ghost civil servants being paid by the government every month.

The government subsequently made attempts to follow the leads and deal with the problem that had been unearthed by the consultant only to be told back by shadow figures and having to cover up and announce that the so called ghost employees had been found. The Army (as depicted in the picture at the top) is remembered to have blatantly refused to account citing state security.

In 2021 the government, through its recent budget speech, is still singing the chorus of reducing the wage bill using tools such as voluntary exit strategy, instituting  a hiring freeze, ignoring calls for periodic inflationary (and other) increases in salaries however it seems that they have summarily given up on the correction of wastage of funds on the identified ghost employees nor have they made attempts to reduce expenditure on political boards and on projects such as the International Convention Centre at Ezulwini.

The question that begs to be answered is ,why would well meaning hard working civil servants be made scapegoats because the government is unable to clean up its own house?