Government inciting workers to demonstrate

Zanu PF government has been accused of inciting civil servants who are in the brink on being retrenched to engage in street protests.

Civil society and  trade unions said the country is fast heading towards a situation similar to the one that prevailed in South African during the apartheid era where people were toyi-toying in the streets because they had no work.

The civil service workforce stood at 554 000 in 2014 up from 315 000 in 2009 and Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa recently said 80% of the budget was going towards civil servants salaries.

Chinamasa said Cabinet had since ordered his ministry and the Civil Service Commission to cut the workforce.

Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions secretary General Japhet Moyo said without a paradigm shift in government's policies, the country would continue to carry ghost workers.

"In English there is an adage that says ‘we are in a catch 22 situation', and in this country we now have two bad choices to make because we have to either choose to create the two million jobs and raise resources to do that, or we have to find ways to reduce the bloated structure of our civil service which has more than 500 000 people, most of whom are ghost workers," Moyo said is quoted saying by Standard.

"We also ask government what happened with the report on ghost workers — because it is well known that there are people who are not adding any value to government yet they are currently earning money."

Moyo said with more job cuts looming it was impossible to then fight poverty and fulfil one of the eight millennium development goals, which is to eradicate poverty.

"The economic outlook is therefore very bleak as things stand. If there is no paradigm shift in our policies, we are going to see more people losing their jobs and going into the informal sector which is overcrowded now. We might create an army of people who will be roaming the streets doing nothing, and students produced from universities will have no work," he said.

Political analyst Dumisani Nkomo said the fact that government was now planning to cut the wage bill meant that they had now come face-to-face with the reality of what former Finance minister Tendai Biti used to say about "eating what we gather".

"They used to demonise Biti, but what all this shows is that Zanu PF election promises of creating two million jobs were empty, meaningless and nonsensical," Nkomo said.

"It shows that the party has failed to run the economy and that they have actually run it down through poor policy formulation, poor implementation of policies, policy inertia and sometimes policy inconsistency."