GOVT’S TEMPTING PLAN FOR EARLY RETIREMENT PACKAGES

MANZINI - Government is at it again. 

This time, the administration is planning to dangle a carrot in the face of civil servants, in terms of handsome packages, that will be availed in the Enhanced Voluntary Early Retirement Scheme (EVERS).

This is aimed at enticing ageing civil servants to consider signing up for early retirement as government deals with the bloated wage bill and the fiscal crisis. 

EVERS is a programme that was introduced by the ninth Parliament. This was at the pinnacle of dire financial straits the country faced after a global meltdown in 2010. It was a programme touted to help government curb its wage bill, in particular with salaries. It was under the Ministry of Public Service as it targeted at least 15 per cent of non-core staff within government.

Programme 

The reinforcement of the programme comes at a time when government has found itself in a position where it had to pay civil servants, including politicians, an extra E57 million, which was not budgeted for, as a one per cent once-off payment. This payment was part of the cost-of-living-adjustment (CoLA) agreement which government had budgeted E227 million for. 

The implementation of CoLA came at a time when government had been advised to cut the wage bill, which is expected to reach E8.617 billion this year.  

In a bid to undo its deeds, government is working against the clock to reinforce EVERS. It has been established that the plans to reintroduce the programme are so advanced such that negotiations would soon begin.

Confirming the plans by government was the Principal Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Public Service, Sipho Tsabedze.  He said, among other things, the rebirth of the initiative was aimed at depreciating the wage bill.

Initially, government announced that it had targeted at least 7 000 civil servants to take the early retirement packages. However, the PS did not want to commit to this figure. Instead, he said consultations were about to be made with the relevant stakeholders before this was implemented.

Strategies 

He said EVERS remained one of government’s strategies aimed at decreasing and managing the wage bill. Tsabedze said at this stage, he was not in a position to talk much about the matter because they were still working on it. 

In fact, he said they were looking at strategies of implementing it. The PS said once their strategy had been finalised, they would engage stakeholders in consultative meetings. He emphasised that he would not say much about the matter because the issues might end up being blown out of proportion.

However, Tsabedze mentioned that government was also considering having attractive packages that would tempt the ageing civil servants to take the voluntary early retirement. When probed on the nature of the packages, Tsabedze again volunteered not to disclose much about what exactly they considered as the matter was still on the table and nothing had been finalised. This envisaged reintroduction of the programme comes at a time when public sector associations (PSAs) relayed to government that it should consider permitting civil servants aged 55 and above to retire.

This, they said, was one of many strategies that the administration could use in dealing with the fatality rate of COVID-19. While advancing this request, past civil servants had rejected EVERS, stating that it was not appealing to them. Some of them demanded that government should, among other things, extend 70 per cent of their pension so that they could venture into income-generating businesses. They said the balance could be paid through monthly salaries awarded by their pension scheme.

Spender 

Meanwhile, according to the global lender, Eswatini is ranked second highest spender on civil servants among the 53 captured countries. It is only beaten by Lesotho whose wage bill to GDP sits at 16 per cent. Coming after Eswatini are Cape Verde, Namibia, Burundi, Eritrea, Botswana, South Africa, Angola and Liberia to mention a few. 

What is interesting is, Eswatini’s GDP is smaller than that of South Africa (E5.5 trillion) and also smaller than that of Botswana, which stands at E226 billion. South Africa spends over E137 billion per year to pay salaries for all government departments, and it has over 400 000 civil servants. Botswana has over 100 000 public servants.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time government tries to implement EVERS as it happened after the financial global meltdown in 2010.

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