Times Of Swaziland: PREVAILING FINANCIAL CHALLENGES

PREVAILING FINANCIAL CHALLENGES
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Editor on 15/06/2022 08:03:00


Sir,
What happened to the good controlling officers who would not hesitate to suspend
the salary of an employee who has not reported to work for three consecutive
days? There is no hard decision needed here; it’s pretty straight forward, get
rid of such employees. One would like to believe that these employees are well
known; otherwise no controlling officer would continue to sign the payroll for
employees that have gone AWOL or cannot be accounted for months on end. It is
incomprehensible that in this day and age, where government is literally
ransacking every sectors pocket to collect enough pennies to get by for each
day, people are getting free salaries.This generosity towards blatant theft of
taxpayers’ money forms part of the entrenched culture of financial
mismanagement that has dumped this country in the economic quagmire it finds
itself in.
The ministry does not need Parliament to instruct it to suspend those salaries
if it is serious about finding missing employees. We have departments within
government that are desperately in need of personnel to provide essential
services for the public but have been denied this request due to the prevailing
financial challenges. Meanwhile, the security forces combined enjoy the highest
budget allocation without a single bullet being fired to protect our sovereignty
from outside forces. The bigger threat to the security of this country remains
in raising a poor educated citizenry, that will be agitated by high unemployment
due to staff and infrastructure shortages in schools which is compromising the
quality of our education.
The country can’t afford to worsen an already volatile unemployment situation.
Many emaSwati lost their jobs last year and these jobs were lost from various
sectors. It should be equally worrying that several emaSwati could be returning
home from South Africa jobless, following anticipated retrenchments in the
mining sector. The decline in private sector growth has contributed
significantly to the bulging civil service wage bill. What the country needs now
is a strong, vibrant private sector and a leaner public sector. Right sizing of
the civil service is inevitable.