EVERS RE-INTRODUCTION SHOULD TARGET NON-PRODUCTIVE SECTORS - ECONOMIST

MANZINI – The re-introduction of the Enhanced Voluntary Early-Retirement Scheme (EVERS) should target non-productive sectors, says an economist.

The economist was asked based on the initiative by government to re-introduce the programme it had been speaking about for over a decade. He said the re-introduction of EVERS would not solve the financial crisis immediately. The economics scholar said it was a long-term solution to the government wage bill challenges. He recommended that government should find other measures that would have immediate effects on the financial challenges faced by the country. His reasoning was that government needed to have the financial muscle to fund the programme as it would not come cheap. This, he said, should also be something lucrative to the civil servants. He said an initial plan should be to target non-productive sectors failing to meet the demands. The economics scholar said this would pave way for the employees to start programmes that would help them tender and render services to government using their expertise.

The economist said this would improve the civil servants’ well-being in that they would generate better salaries from their business establishments. He said there was a need to merge some government departments to provide the administration with an opportunity to minimise the wage bill, while also using available resources where they were needed. On the other hand, the economics scholar said a civil service reform was needed in the country in order to deal with the increasing number of public servants and allocate them tasks reflective of their skills.

Professionalism

The civil service reform, according to the economist, would be a deliberate action to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and professionalism of the bureaucracy with the view to promote better service delivery. This, the economist said, would increase accountability while assuring sustainability under overall fiscal constraints, and strengthening measures for performance management. “The country needs to adopt efforts to overhaul and reform the civil service and parastatals in terms of wages and employment. The size and cost of the civil service is becoming excessive and this deficiency, therefore, is a key issue and target of structural adjustment as argued by the IMF before. “The growing concern with containing the size and improving the performance of the civil service signifies a reframing of the role and the dimension of government, reflecting a fundamental shift in economic development policy,” the economist said.

The scholar posited that the civil service and employment reform resorted to various mechanisms including the removal of ghosts and posts; enforcing retirement regulations; freezing recruitment; eliminating guaranteed rights; containing wages and retrenchment. He said like in many developing countries, the recruitment of civil servants bordered on being an incentive for political patronage and social welfare for loyalists while sidelining the need for the recruitment and the availability of resources. The economist said political influence was the sole reason the country was ignoring the alarming figures of public servants that had dried State coffers. According to the scholar, voluntary retrenchments were an option as opposed to retrenching civil servants within departments that were no longer competitive. However, the economist said there could be fear from government that retrenchment would incite destabilising social upheavals.

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