EX-POLITICIANS TO SHARE E55 MILLION THIS WEEK

MBABANE – With the health and the education sectors in tatters, parliamentarians of the 10th Parliament have convincingly jumped the queue and will get their gratuity this week.

The health sector is engulfed by a myriad of challenges such that patients in national health centres, instead of getting medication, are furnished with prescriptions to obtain their medication from pharmacies at a high cost.

This is inclusive of patients who are over 60 years of age who are not supposed to pay for their medical expenditure in government health institutions.
Also, leading to the opening of schools, head teachers have been reiterating their complaints that government was expecting them to be miracle performers. This, they claimed, was because government wanted great results while failing to increase the free primary education (FPE) grants and attending to some schools’ needs.

While the school calendar resumes tomorrow, government is expected to pay in full for all FPE beneficiaries as the European Union terminated its sponsorship of about E17 million per year.

Government will in the next few days give former politicians E55 million payout. This will be in the form of gratuity that shall be paid to all the 95 former parliamentarians who exited office last year.

bucopho

Also, from the E55 million, government shall be paying 55 constituency headmen and 336 bucopho. This is according to Finance Circular No.2 of 2013. The circular stipulates that the ex-gratia payment is a grant payable to former parliamentarians to assist with the costs of adjusting to non-parliamentary life.
The ex-gratia payment is available to all parliamentarians who fail to be re-elected or re-appointed into the new Parliament.

The circular states that in the event the parliamentarian does not fully serve the five-year-term, the ex-gratia payment will be pro-rated, taking into account the actual period served.

The ex-gratia will be paid as once-off payment equal to one year basic salary before taxation for all former parliamentarians. 
According to Setsabile Dlamini, Communications Officer of the Ministry of Finance, government will spend about E55 million on the payout to the former politicians. “They will be getting their gratuity in the next few days as it is already being computed,” Dlamini said.

The ex-politicians have been making a lot of noise regarding their pay and government seems to have bowed down to the pressure. However, it is on record that some suppliers have not been paid a cent by government, some of whom have been owed for close to a year now.

Some of the former politicians engaged by this publication stated that they needed their money regardless of the ongoing challenges. The politicians said as much as they were willing to assist government in anyway possible, they needed their money as well.

Schools

The former legislators were engaged on whether they would be willing to get their gratuity later on after government had fulfilled its obligations in schools and health sector or paid owed suppliers who were ideally first in line.
The questioning on whether the legislators were willing to receive their gratuity prior to the State addressing the national challenges emanated from the documented shortfalls experienced in recent times.

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