Civil service clean-up on the way in a matter of weeks

A clean-up of Zimbabwe’s bloated civil service which is gobbling up 83 percent of government expenditure is on the way, and according to Presidential spokesman George Charamba people should expect changes in “weeks”.

Charamba told The Chronicle that the nation must now brace up for major reforms within the civil service.

In his State-of-the-Nation-Address President Robert Mugabe said that the government had turned the spotlight on corporate governance throughout the public sector. He pointed out that corporate governance principles had fallen to levels well below those “minimally acceptable”.

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the government’s goal was to reduce the civil service wage bill to less than 40 percent of government expenditure.

Charamba told The Chronicle: “I can..confirm that the civil service audit is a response to a cabinet directive of February 10, 2015, which required that ‘consideration be given to some rationalisation of the country’s public service establishment in order to cut down the size of the wage bill’.”

“The audit exercise was very physical and entailed deployment of Civil Service Commission staff to every corner of the country and the miracle is that such a mammoth exercise has been concluded within six months of issuance of the directive.

“The nation must now brace up for major reform initiatives in the public service in the intervening weeks,” he said.

The last government audit carried out in 2010 showed that there were over 75 000 ghost workers but nothing was done to weed them out.

The latest audit shows a lot of anomalies in the education sector where more than 2 000 teachers were not found at schools where they are supposed to be teaching.

It also shows 32 schools with two headmasters, 63 with two deputy headmasters, and 170 schools with deputy headmasters when they are not supposed to have any.

The government is also paying 2 888 teachers who are working for private schools.

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