Salary review to better public services

TANZANIA, like other countries, has in several times experienced paralysed social services as a result of go-slow public servants. The sectors affected most have always been education and health, let alone individual public worker dissatisfaction in other sectors within public spectrum. Several times, pupils and students had to spend a whole day in a classroom without seeing a teacher. Patients helplessly endured pains in hospital beds as others died because the health workers had boycotted. One of the major factors behind this was that they were demanding better payment as the government struggling rising salaries due to limited budget against the number of public employees. The workers’ grievances over the low pay has always been part of the yearly Workers’ Day as the government never stopped to promise them that things will be improved. In fact, public salaries have been slightly increased in each of the budget despite shortfalls in the budgets. But, on Tuesday this week, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa announced that one of the challenges faced the government in paying workers better salaries was that good number of them were phantom, thus the little budget is shared among many workers. This has led to genuine workers taking home little salaries on expenses of ghost workers. Now, the future seems to become brighter to the workers after the government assured that it has completed clearing the phantom workers and promised that clearance of debts and arrears for civil servants is scheduled to start soon after the certification of all genuine employees in the public payroll system. The government said the number of phantom workers who had been costing the government billions of money monthly in terms of salaries and other remunerations reached 16,500 as of October 20. Premier Majaliwa said in Dar es Salaam on Tuesday at the commemoration of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM)’s 55th anniversary that upon completion of the verification work, the government will announce the new salary structure, noting that the state through the Board of Salaries was reviewing salaries in the public sector for improvement. President John Magufuli when he spoke to staff of the Tanzania Port Authority (TPA) recently he told them not to fear about exercise of verification of public workers’ academic certificates since it is meant to ensure that one gets the salary they deserve. He noted that in public entities the government would want to see fair payment based on the qualifications of the particular public employee. For anyone who wishes to see efficient provision of public services could certainly say kudos to the government for managing to clear the public payroll and consequently enabling it moving to improve the salaries to genuine workers. Indeed, if you want your employees to perform well, you need to take their satisfaction into consideration. Increasing salaries helps employees meet their needs they initially could not and thus this goes a long way in improving performance at work. Human Resources experts believe that increasing the amount you pay your employees will not only alleviate their present stress, but also help them feel more secure about their future. Financial stress caused when public servant becomes broke could be addressed by helping them make ends meet. This would improve their productivity and satisfaction because they’ll no longer be distracted by financial problems. Therefore, as the government looks forward to improve the salaries as the results of reduced ghost workers, it is expected that state of public services and workers performance will no longer be the same.