Given Zanu (PF)’s unyielding commitment to profligacy and its predilection to treat the national purse as its own, we have always expected President Robert Mugabe’s party to be the stumbling block to any effort to rebuild the economy and rescue the country from years of hunger and misery.
But what we never anticipated was that the MDC would so easily capitulate to Zanu (PF) the way they did when they so embarrassingly buckled to pressure to hike salaries for civil servants without demanding that the Public Service Commission first weed out the 75 000 ghost workers (read Zanu PF agents) bleeding the fiscus.
For the record, we are not opposed to public workers getting a salary increase. No, not at all! We will be the first to call for more pay for civil servants if and when the money is available. And we believe that the government is capable of paying its workers decent salaries.
All that is required is for it to dismiss the thousands of Zanu (PF) youths, so-called war veterans and other thugs deployed by Mugabe’s party in the civil service where they are paid to do nothing. The money saved could go towards improving salaries for genuine public workers.
By not standing up to Mugabe and demanding that he gets rid of ghost workers before the government could honour his promise to increase civil servants’ salaries, by not backing Finance Minister Tendai Biti in his lonely and ultimately futile bid to stop Zanu (PF) from using the national purse to fund its political programmes, the two MDC parties have dismally failed Zimbabweans.
As it stands, the government expects to run a $700 million deficit by December and this is sure to put a damper on an economic recovery that, at best, looks fragile and uncertain.
Besides, raising salaries in an environment where the state cannot increase revenue collection can only have a negative knock-on effect on other functions of the government, especially infrastructure development. The Treasury will be forced to divert cash meant for building roads, schools, hospitals and dams to fund the wage increase.
But the ugliest part of it all is that it is the common people, the ordinary villager or city resident, who will suffer when hospitals stop functioning or when roads are impassible because of lack of maintenance. These are the same people who trust the MDC to be defending their interests in the unity government. It is a huge betrayal.
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