‘SEC MD TURNING BLIND EYE ON OFFICE ROMANCE’

MBABANE – The Managing Director (MD) of the Swaziland Electricity Company (SEC), Meshack Kunene, has been accused of allegedly turning a blind eye on a love relationship between a senior manager and a junior staff member.

This is contained in the petition by the Swaziland Electricity Supply Maintenance and Allied Workers Union (SESMAWU) where the workers are calling for the Chairman of the Board of Directors, S’thofeni Ginindza to remove the MD.
According to the petition, there is allegedly a manager who is dating a junior staff member ‘because she has too much money to spend on him’. The union made reference to one of the parastatal’s clauses, which stated that management shall not behave in a manner that does not uphold the stature and responsibility to managerial positions. “Such behaviour shall include but is not restricted to encouraging personal and intimate relationships with subordinates or junior employees or among members of management,” reads the clause that the union made reference to in the petition. The union alleged that the senior manager and the junior staff member displayed their relationship in front of the entire staff of the organisation and that the MD allegedly knew but had never said anything against it.

According to the union, the junior staffer was allegedly always driving the senior manager’s vehicle even in the workplace and walked the manager into her office. “We would like to remind the Chairman of the Board of Directors that this is the same manager who was paid a huge amount of acting allowance for a junior position. This means that the manager is just a god in her office, doing everything that pleases her heart,” the union alleged. In its argument, the union said it was left with many questions than answers on where the organisation was headed to. The question posed by the union was if the organisation was an animal farm where other people were allowed to break  policies while others were not. The feeling by the union is that if the individual was a junior staffer, she would definitely have been charged for such an offence. Another strong allegation against Kunene is that he was promoting corruption with what they termed poor leadership style when it comes to the organisation’s policy which stipulated objectives and gave direction on how things were supposed to be done. Detailing how the policy worked, the union stated that when it comes to acting allowances, a person of higher level was not supposed to act in a junior position and that it did not state how he or she may be paid.

A clause quoted in the petition was that the Human Resource Policy, on acting allowances, stated that employees who acted for incumbents in grade E1-F1 (only executive positions) would not receive any acting allowances unless the period of acting was in excess of 30 days. The allegation in the petition is that there was a senior manager who acted for another in a junior position who was paid an alarming amount of about E84 000 and that the payments went via the MD who endorsed it by appending his signature. When the story about the petition was broken by this newspaper yesterday, Kunene said he had not seen the petition and that he would speak to the union first prior to responding.
The union further accused the MD of being a puppet of the parastatal’s Legal Department. In its many concerns contained in the petition calling for the removal of Kunene, the parastatal’s union alleged that there was no decision that was taken without him consulting the legal office. According to the union, Kunene allegedly told them that he consulted the Legal Department whenever there was an issue or decision to be taken. To the union, such an act was just poisoned milk given to the employees.

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