The Sunday News
Vusumuzi Dube Municipal Correspondent
THE Bulawayo City Council has set itself on a collision course with its workers with reports that the local authority is revisiting a previous failed resolution to retrench its staffers with the local authority recently flighting a tender to carry out a staff rationalisation and job evaluation exercise. Impeccable council sources revealed that the local authority has adopted the move in a bid to deal with budget constraints.
This comes just three months after the Harare City Council booted out its spokesperson, Mr Leslie Gwindi and three other senior managers whose positions were made redundant by the city’s restructuring programme.
The Gweru City Council also last Thursday announced plans to retrench half of its 1 300 workforce to reduce its $1,3 million salary bill. The council said they would first implement a two-week work schedule to possibly reduce salaries and if the wage bill remains unsustainable, they would then retrench half of its workforce.
BCC has in the past clashed with its workers as it has constantly failed to pay their salaries on time and at one time had considered retrenching just over 1 000 of its workforce.
Efforts to get a comment from the city’s mayor Councillor Martin Moyo were fruitless. However, deputy mayor Clr Gift Banda downplayed the issue saying this was just a routine exercise.
“This has nothing to do with retrenchment, we are satisfied with the current establishment although according to our current figures we have just over 3 000 when we actually need 5 000,” he said.
The council’s senior public relations officer, Mrs Nesisa Mpofu, on the other hand said they would only make a decision on whether they would be retrenching after the completion of the exercise.
“The decision on retrenchment will only be made after the completion of the evaluation, rationalisation and restructuring before the start and finalisation of the exercises you cannot decide whether or not you are retrenching as an organisation.
“Rationalisation is meant to identify staffing levels in each section and ensure that the levels are commensurate with the level of activity in the city, the staff complement should be supportive of service delivery, job evaluation will be to identify over graded and under graded positions and ensure all positions in council are appropriately graded and there is full utilisation of labour while restructuring as an exercise ensures that the structure is cost effective and promotes effectiveness and efficiency,” said Mrs Mpofu.
She revealed that the local authority presently has a staff complement of 3 584 of which they required an actual establishment of 5 070.
Last week the council placed an advert (number 4709) in the local media inviting tenders from qualified and experienced management consultancies to carry out a job evaluation and staff rationalisation for the local authority.
“The City of Bulawayo invites tenders from suitably qualified and experienced management consultancy to carry out job evaluation, rationalisation and organisational restructuring for the local authority. “Tender documents with specifications are obtainable upon payment of a non-refundable fee of $10 from office 126, 1st floor, City Hall, Cnr Fife Street and Leopold Takawira Avenue during office hours (8:30 to 16:30) as from Monday 23 February 2015,” read part of the notice.
This is the second time that the local authority has called for a similar tender; in 2012 they were forced to abandon it under unclear circumstances with allegations that workers had arm-twisted council into abandoning the exercise.
Council sources revealed that the local authority was under pressure to follow in the footsteps of the Harare City Council, to slash their workforce so as to reduce their wage bill.
“The thinking behind this exercise is that we are still operating under a system that was set by the colonial government which says the local authority needs a staff complement of 5 000, which has seen council officials always making noise about being understaffed but we are saying: ‘do we really need 5 000 workers’?
“On the other hand, Harare did a similar exercise last year after pressure from the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing. Now we have to take the same route noting that there are some redundant positions within the municipality. If we really discover that there are some redundant positions we will have to retrench but our wish is to get rid of the excess staff through natural wastage,” said the source.
The source further revealed that the local authority was nursing a shortage in critical areas, like health services hence they needed to layoff staffers in other departments so as to employ more nurses.
The local authority has been facing financial problems for some time now with the municipal workers crying foul over non-payment of salaries and in some instances downing tools demanding remuneration of over three months.
By December last year the local authority was one month behind in paying workers’ salaries and had resorted to paying bonuses in batches.
According to the latest council report the local authority gobbles $4 261 757 a month which goes to salary related costs while they collect an average of $8 million per month.
A total of $40 471 goes towards paying of utilities, $1 310 124 for taxes, $2 287 422 for trade creditors while $38 564 goes to financial institutes.
This means that in a month the local authority directs $7 938 338 on service delivery unrelated costs leaving just $61 662 for service delivery.
Previously the local authority also considered the retrenchment of 1 049 workers with some having to endure salary and allowance cuts.
In November last year the Harare City Council booted out its spokesperson Mr Leslie Gwindi and three other senior managers whose positions were made redundant by the city’s restructuring programme. In June the city sent packing seven directors in an effort to reduce its salary bill, which was consuming more than half of its revenue.
The Harare Municipality also collapsed several departments in a new structure, resulting in some directors becoming redundant.
