Home | Letters | CUT SALARIES TO HELP ECONOMY

CUT SALARIES TO HELP ECONOMY

16/01/2019 08:43:00 The Editor

Font size:

Sir,

The Kingdom of Eswatini always faces financial challenges. Every year it is one financial crisis after another.

If and when the economy does improve we go back to our old ways of negligent spending or unnecessary extravagances because of our confused priorities.
In the past the country tried to use different ways or methods to revive the economy, one of which was to cut salaries of all politicians including legislators who agreed to a 10 per cent salary cut.

Demanded

In the past, all politicians agreed to have their salaries cut, unfortunately since we groom poor quality politicians they later came around and demanded their money back which was too bad.
What about today? What is going to happen? Is it too early to come to any conclusion, but I doubt if the current legislators or politicians can agree that their salaries be cut by 20 per cent.

Failed

If their predecessors failed to do it, it means that these are also going to fail. Let us all wait and see.
The reason I think that our economy is not doing well is because of the people who loot it, there are just too many politicians who are highly paid when compared to other countries in the SADC Region.

For instance, the highest paid in the country gets about E80 000 while the lowest gets about E50 000. The country cannot afford to pay such people presently and they are now a financial burden to the taxpayers.

Peter Sibeko
Luyengo

His Majesty King Mswati III appointed a Royal Commission which has the main mandate of reviewing the salaries of the politicians for the 11th Parliament. The Commission is chaired by SSA Chief Executive Officer Phil Mnisi.
The new politicians are currently being paid using Finance Circular No.2 of 2013 which was used by the last Parliament. The Mnisi-led commission is expected to handover its report in February. We will only learn then what the recommendations are concerning the salary cuts.
Ed.