TALK ABOUT SUSTAINABLE PUBLIC SECTOR FIRST

More often than not, public sector strike actions in Eswatini always turn into a political action to drive other national grievances besides the employer-employee relationship between the Government of Eswatini and civil servants.

Government is inherently political because it takes our money and gets to decide how to spend it in the economy to benefit citizens and the various social and economic agents.

In other words, government gets to decide who gets to enjoy life in Eswatini by allocating resources in the different sectors of the economy. Hence, a large number of civil servants are able to use their collective bargaining to influence some of the decisions on how government spends money in the economy.

Trickling

Given the current economic climate, the public sector associations (PSAs) want to see a huge chunk of that money trickling into their bank accounts.
Of course, for the most part, the political issues that PSAs seek to address are valid in terms of lobbying for changes that can improve the standard of living for all emaSwati. However, this is not always the case especially when it comes at the expense of driving an unsustainable civil service sector that ends up being costly to all taxpayers in the economy.

Before government can take any decisions on the cost-of-living-adjustment for its civil servants, it needs to address the structural problems that have marred the public sector in Eswatini that make this sector inefficient and unsustainable.
It is as if the PSAs have forgotten that there is a lot of dead weight within government that is benefitting from the huge public sector wage bill that we, as a country, are failing to bring down to sustainable levels.

The conversations between government, as the employer, and the PSAs, as employees, should focus more on the steps that need to be taken to cut down on the number of civil servants and how those who can remain in office can be efficient and ensure value for money in public service delivery.
It is not that we are saying there is no function for the public sector in the economy. In fact, no country can function without a public sector and Eswatini too needs public sector employees who citizens can count on to deliver the variable public services within education, health, commerce and so on.

Supporting

Obviously, there is a lot that is not going well in the Eswatini social and economic space but let us not all get caught up in the bandwagon of supporting the public sector strike thinking that things will get better for all of us once their needs have been met.

Yes, the cost of living has gone up but the public sector is also part and parcel of why the economy is failing to grow and especially why government always comes back to the rest of us to ask for more money in the form of tax.

The truth is that everyone who pays tax in Eswatini is now responsible for keeping civil servants in office and footing the cost of living adjustment bill every year. If government agrees to give its civil servants the proposed three per cent adjustment on their salaries in 2020, obviously that money has to come from somewhere.

The easiest way for government to make a quick buck to pay for all the bills it takes on whether they make sense or not is through you and me in all the taxes we pay.

So a hasty decision to calm public sector associations by giving them what they want will come back to bite all of us in the rear-end when government starts taxing every economic activity and hiking the total amount of tax we pay in each case.
It would be unwise for government to appease one tiny section of the population by pissing off the rest of Eswatini population.
So here is the point; let us not cherry pick and choose the socio-political issues that make it to the list of priority grievances between government and the PSAs.

Draining

The country needs to address all the issues even if it means some of the civil servants have to be shown the exit door to seek employment opportunities outside of the public sector.
The civil service wage bill is one of the key expenditure items that is draining the economy and costing the G-wallet more than half of the money collected through taxes. Government cannot, therefore, keep committing more money to the public sector without changing the quality of public services we get in return

As concerned taxpayers who do not want to lose more money just to keep peace between government and civil servants in their cushy jobs, we implore government and the PSAs to engage on a balanced and realistic dialogue on how to establish a sustainable public sector in Eswatini.

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