PREVAILING FINANCIAL CHALLENGES

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.    

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