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HIRING 700 COPS TO HIKE WAGE BILL BY E4.2M

31/01/2021 23:17:00 BY STANLEY KHUMALO

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MANZINI – The recruitment of the 700 police officers will increase the wage bill by E4.2 million per month.

This follows that the Royal Eswatini Police Service (REPS) National Commissioner, William Dlamini, said they had filed a request with government to recruit about 700 police officers.

He said this was because the service had been affected by deaths, retirements and defections of personnel. In light of this reduction of personnel, the recruitment, according to Dlamini, shall be partitioned into two, with a possible intake of 350 officers per recruitment.

He said this was envisaged to take place within a period of two years. Worth noting, a recruit becomes a fully fledged police officer after a year of training.

Dlamini explained that the law dictated that while one was recruited and already partaking in the training, he or she was expected to be remunerated fully.

It was gathered that police recruits were in 2014 offered E6 000 per month. If the 700 recruits shall be paid at this scale, it means that government’s wage bill shall increase by E4.2 million per month.

However, since then, there have been developments in that civil servants were awarded cost-of- living adjustments (CoLA), which might escalate the remuneration for the next intake.

The CoLA awarded in the 2016/17 financial year was 6.5 per cent while last year, public servants were awarded three per cent. This could be translated into an increment of 9.5 per cent since the last recruitment.

Adjust

Given these developments, the Treasury Department could be forced to adjust its wage bill by E4 599 000 for the 700 recruits. This is because the tabulation of this CoLA implies that each ,officer’s remuneration, while still undergoing training, would be E6 570. By extension, this means that government would have to pay E2 299 500 for the 350 recruits in the first batch.

Despite this anticipated increment, it should be noted that the recruitments were set to fill posts that had been held by officers who were remunerated.

Some of these officers were in senior positions and were also afforded extra benefits beside the remuneration accorded to warders. This, therefore, according to Dlamini, does not mean the recruitments shall balloon the wage bill per se.

Instead, he said: “We are replacing officers who were in the service and were earning salaries. Some of them were senior and drew a far larger salary than those that we shall recruit.”

Dlamini said government had as a matter of fact saved enormously as there had been no promotions and recruitments since the introduction of the hiring freeze in August 2018.

The hiring freeze, which was reaffirmed by government last year September, advised principal secretaries and heads of department that there would be no recruitments in the civil service as a means to deal with the wage bill.

It also emphasised that ministries and departments should not promote any employee and for any pressing need to recruit, a request should be advanced to Cabinet.

Recently, government announced that it sought to reduce the wage bill by E900 million in three years. The three years, according to the deceased Minister of Public Service, Christian Ntshangase, started in the past financial year (2019/20) and shall lapse in 2021/22.

Saved

It was said government had already saved E300 million in the past financial year and sought to duplicate it in this financial year and the subsequent. This was calculated as being equivalent to five per cent of the wage bill.

Furthermore, it was supposed to have been achieved through the interim interventions which among them included the abolishment of all redundant positions and they (ministry) were retaining strategically relevant ones.

Also, it was claimed that through the skills management audit in order to determine the number of diverse qualifications and competencies in the Public Service. This exercise was further meant to identify skills to jobs, match and then synchronise those skills to the right jobs.

It is worth noting that five most recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank country reports cautioned that Eswatini’s largest budgetary ‘outlier’ on the expenditure side, 23 and also the single largest contributor to the fiscal deficit, was the size of the wage bill.

According to global lender, the IMF, Eswatini ranked 2nd highest spender on civil servants among the 53 captured countries. Currently, estimates of the wage bill are said to be E8.44 billion which corresponds to 37 per cent of government’s expenditure.