By Machenjera Peter – PTUZ Secretary for Information and Publicity
At law, any deduction from an employee’s salary or wage should get the employee’s consent. In most cases, deduction forms are completed by the employee, instructing the Salary Service Beruae (SSB) to effect such deduction and appending a signature to authenticate and authorise the same.
However, what the teachers in particular, and civil servants in general, witnessed yesterday was a clear act of chicanery and thievery from an uncaring government. Teachers woke up yesterday to witness the shock of the day when they discovered that government had fulfilled its dubious 2.5% GEMS Fund deductions from every gvt workers’ salary. This is supposed to happen for the next three months starting this February before the members could apply for the funds.
What makes this a criminal act is that gvt never consulted its workers or the workers’representatives (teachers’ unions) as per norm. It is this paternalistic approach which surprised the teachers and can only be described as day-light robbery. At a time teachers were/ are expecting a restoration of the purchasing power parity of their salaries, the gvt was busy planning how to circumcise salaries of suffering teachers who have since tested positive to poverty. Most teachers are earning less than 18000 RTGS (inclusive of housing, transport and covid allowances) which translates to USD 150 using the functional black market rate. This can even be less than USD 100 if ones considers the transfer charges.
Government is, therefore, reminded that the paternalistic approach will not work but collective and inclusive dialogue, and mutual understanding. There are several questions which remain unanswered because of this unilateralism; viz,
▪️who consented to the deduction? Gvt should provide evidence in the form of opt-in forms since they are talking about opt-out forms.
▪️Is everyone in need of this scheme since quite a number of teachers do not own stands or houses but had their salaries circumcised?
▪️Did gvt consider those teachers with rural homes or they are only targeting those in towns and growth points?
▪️Is the maximum of 200 000 RTGS enough to construct a house or make meaningful renovations for those who already have houses?
▪️Who is responsible for the management of these funds?
▪️Is it true that gvt indeed poured 75 million as seed fund for this scheme or it’s only utopian.
With all these questions at hand, one is tempted to conclude that gvt has hatched a plan to steal from it’s poor workers, particularly teachers, at a time when there is an urgent need for a road map for the restoration of their USD salaries. Therefore, gvt should stop its unpalatable GEMS Fund deductions forthwith and refund the amounts deducted so far. Gvt should never take teachers or its workers for fools because there shall come a time when they will awaken the beast in them and fiercely resist this stupid thievery.
All avenues should be exhausted, including urgently challenging this in court, in order to stop this nonsense. All teachers across union divide should come together to resist this nonsense for posterity’s sake.
Machenjera Peter
PTUZ Secretary for Information and Publicity*
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