'I'm not protecting ghost workers'

LOCAL Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister, Saviour Kasukuwere, has angrily denied suggestions that his move to stop urban authorities from dismissing staff is driven less by concerns for the plight of workers than by the desire to protect hundreds of Zanu-PF members who are allegedly ghost-working in these municipalities.

Zanu-PF is often accused of rewarding its members and supporters by deploying them to various local authorities, where they draw salaries in return for nothing.

And when Kasukuwere, who is also the Zanu-PF secretary for the commissariat, vetoed the dismissal of more than 3 000 workers by council last month, observers concluded that this was meant to protect those deployed by his party, including ghost workers.

Last week, the Local Government Minister, denied harbouring any ulterior motives.

"Where are they? I don't know that there are any ghost workers in Harare and if they are indeed there, why are they paying them? They should simply expose them instead of trying to use that as an excuse to fire people willy-nilly… this is why we had to intervene and put a stop to it," Kasukuwere told the Financial Gazette.

Last month, a Harare City Council full meeting agreed to take advantage of the July 17 Supreme Court ruling - which makes it easy for employers to dismiss workers - to send home 3 000 workers, but the move was quickly blocked by Kasukuwere.

The minister went on to reverse the dismissal of 124 workers by Chinhoyi municipality.

Kasukuwere said as far as he was concerned, the decision taken by his ministry was not driven by any other motive apart from making sure that no worker feels treated unjustly.

He challenged any local authority that is sure that it has ghost workers to remove them from its payroll.

"If they are sure that there are ghost workers in the council, why are they paying them? They should just remove them," Kasukuwere said.

He said the processes that he had stopped were, in his view, not only justified but had also been done without any consultation with the parent ministry.

Kasukuwere said he had no problems with the local authorities shedding off excess staff provided the exercise is done in a transparent way.

He, however, could not be drawn to explain why, if government was really concerned with the sorry plight of workers, it has only been his ministry that has intervened when several government departments and parastatals had been dismissing workers unchecked.

He said he could only speak on the position adopted by his ministry, as he is not a government spokesman.

In 2010, an internal audit carried out by the Harare City Council in the aftermath of successive commissions hand-picked by Zanu-PF ministers to replace opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) councils revealed that the city had hundreds of ghost workers and most of these were linked to the powerful Zanu-PF party.

Warship Dumba, a former councillor for Harare's Ward 17 (Mount Pleasant), who was in office during the city's internal staff audit, claims that as high as 60 percent of the city's combined work-force, of about 10 000, could be made up of ghost workers.

A ghost employee is someone recorded on the payroll system, but who does no work for the business. The ghost can be a real person who knowingly or not is placed on the payroll, or a fictitious person invented by the dishonest employee.

The fraud attacks the payroll system with false employees.

"Harare City Council has a workforce of about 10 000 people. One would, however, wonder where and how all these people work. The evidence of the city workers on the ground are the municipal police chasing around vendors and those collecting parking dues in the city's CBD," Dumba said.

"The city traffic cops are the other visible sight on the roads. Few nurses are also seen in the council clinics. In the district offices, there is no activity on the ground."

Harare's permanent staff compliment stands at nearly 6 500, but there are thousands more employed as contract workers.

Harare Residents' Trust director, Precious Shumba, said it was highly possible that the city was saddled with a ghost worker burden as corruption (by both Zanu-PF and MDC-T) over the years has resulted in the continuous hiring of workers even when no vacancies existed.

"Most of the affected employees came through partisan recruitment proceedings and the majority are unqualified to do the work they are doing. There are hundreds of workers whose records of employment are opaque," Shumba said. "This is the situation with City Park and EasiPark where all councillors have brought in their relatives to work, despite not having the requisite qualifications."

The problem of politically well-connected ghost workers has haunted the capital city for a long time. War veteran leader and current Buhera South legislator, Joseph Chinotimba, - a former municipal police officer - did not report for duty for nearly a decade and continued to draw his salary until he decided to resign in 2008.

Disgraced former Zanu-PF youth chairman, Jim Kunaka, another council employee, reportedly went AWOL for extended periods until he was dismissed early this year.

The government has so far removed more than 3 000 names from the civil service payroll as an on-going staff audit has revealed shocking levels of ghost-workmanship.

An inconclusive payroll and skills audit carried out by Ernst & Young (India) at the beginning of the inclusive government indicated that there could have been as much as 75 000 ghost workers on the civil service payroll.

Most of the ghost workers - largely graduates from the controversial National Youth Service programme - were allegedly forwarded from Kasukuwere's former ministry, that of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment, to various ministries as "youth officers".