For the third time in 18 months, the Mozambican Assembly of the Republic, the country’s parliament, on Tueday will discuss the revision of the law implementing the Single Wage Table (TSU), which was first passed in December 2021.
The revision of the law had initially been tabled for Monday but it was postponed to give time to parliament’s specialised commissions to issue their opinion, according to Esperança Bias, the parliament’s chairperson.
The revision seeks to cut the wages of ministers, members of parliament, state secretaries, among others, in a measure aimed at reducing the public sector payroll bill.
The TSU is an attempt to create a single payroll system out of 108 different wage tables and a whole range of supplements and subsidies – for the most senior officials, wages and subsides are a percentage of those received by the President.
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The implementation of the TSU has been shambolic, to say the least. Senior managers at the Ministry of Economy and Finance warned then Minister of Finance, Adriando Maleiane, the current Prime Minister, of the impracticality of the proposed wage table.
The warning on deaf ears, as Maleiane authorised the idea which premise is that nobody in the public sector should earn more than the President, thus establishing some sort of monarchical hierarchy.
Furthermore, the idea was never discussed with the other sectors, which led to strikes within the health and education sectors.
Observers claim that to remedy the situation, President Filipe Nyusi passed the task to the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Celso Correia, meaning that a certificate of incompetency was handed out to Maleiane and his successor Max Tonela.
Regardless, the government will continue with its reform of the civil service wage bill as agreed in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) it signed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which envisages the cutting down of the said wage bill by 17 percent by 2026, representing $425 million per year from a peak in 2023.
Furthermore, in 2021, government lowered the retiment age from 65 to 60 years for all sectors. However, maybe after it recognised its mistake, in July 2022, government announced that it would raise the retirement age in the civil service to 65 years for both men and women.
It remains to be seen whether the recent revision will have the desired impact, but the move might have serious political implications for the ruling Frelimo party, especially because the country is heading towards municipal (2023) and general (2024) elections.
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