SALARY RESTRUCTURING: JUNIOR COPS, WARDERS CALLED TO URGENT MEETING

MANZINI - They are not wasting any time!

This is because junior police and Correctional Services officers have been called to an urgent national executive and branch committees’ meeting on Saturday over the prolonged Phase II of the salary restructuring exercise of 2014. In particular, they will have discussions regarding the report and recommendations of the security services joint task team, which was given a task to look at the impact of the non-implementation of this phase. However, the meeting will be open to junior police and Correctional Services officers, who will be off duty on Saturday.
Following reports about the security services’ joint task team report and recommendations on how the prolonged Phase II of the salary restructuring exercise of 2014 should be implemented, some of the affected officers within the Royal Eswatini Police Service (REPS) and His Majesty’s Correctional Services (HMCS), demanded that their unions should take action.

Meeting

In response to that, the Police Staff Association (PSA) and Eswatini Correctional Services Staff Association (ECOSSA) have called an urgent executive and branch committees’ meeting for the affected junior officers within the two State security organs. These developments were confirmed by the PSA Secretary, Sergeant Dumisile Khumalo and ECOSSA Secretary Nduduzo Simelane, yesterday. Simelane said ECOSSA national executive committee (NEC) held a virtual meeting on Tuesday night and deliberated on the security services joint task team report. “We found it to be an insult to some of our members, those in lower ranks to be specific,” he said.

He said the meeting resolved that they should convene an executive and branch committees meeting on Saturday at 10:30am in Manzini, and the venue for the meeting would be communicated in due course. “The sole reason for the meeting is to take mandate from the membership on steps that we should take, following the joint task team report on Phase II, which we refer to as an insult,” Simelane said. He said the meeting would be open to all officers who would be off duty on Saturday. He also highlighted that they would be together with their counterparts from the police service.

Resolved

On the same note, the secretary of the PSA said they had resolved to call a joint executive and branch committees’ meeting with their equals from Correctional Services. She said the main aim of the meeting would be to deliberate a way forward as they had seen that they were supposedly vulnerable since no one seemed to care about their welfare. “What we know is that if we stand up, we will get what we deserve as it happened in 2008 when we established the unions, government adjusted our salaries and fixed an anomaly which had happened in the previous year (2017), where senior officers and officials were awarded lucrative salary adjustments and only notched the juniors,” Khumalo said. She also highlighted that in as much as they were still working on means of getting an emissary who would take them to the King to report their plight, which they believed he was not aware of, they wanted to hear what their members suggested should be done, hence they called the executive and branch committees’ meeting.

Trusted

Khumalo highlighted that they no longer trusted the administrations of the security services, because they had purportedly let them down in 2007 and 2014. She said they would not allow them to do it again now, thus they were banking their hopes on the Commissioner-In-Chief of the security forces, His Majesty King Mswati III. In fact, she said the King had demonstrated that he cared about their welfare, as he publicly gave them assurance that government would support them. During the commemoration of the Police Day earlier this month, the King said; “We are aware of the many issues where support is required to make your work as a police service more seamless and efficient. These cover general welfare and appropriate working equipment. The issues are receiving the necessary attention and the required support will be provided.”

It is worth noting that the joint task team recommended that the lowest ranks (sergeants /sergeant instructors, warder instructors and constables/warders) in the police and Correctional Services should get three per cent compensation from the Phase II of the restructuring exercise of 2014. On the other hand, it recommended that officers occupying ranks between assistant inspectors/assistant chief officers and superintendents should enjoy a salary upgrade that would range between 8.1 per cent and 22.6 per cent.

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