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Come out clean over recruitment – Kalaba

By ADRIAN MWANZA

GOVERNMENT should come out clean over the recruitment of the 11, 200 health workers as rumour has it that the process does not have the blessings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Democratic Party President Harry Kalaba has said.

Mr Kalaba said information reaching him was that the IMF was not happy with Government’s decision to employ health workers due to the huge wage bill which comes with it.

“I want to challenge Government to clear this issue once and for all because we are told the IMF is not happy with the recruitment process,” he said.

The recruitment process is set to gobble K930 million for the 11, 200 health workers which has not augured well with the IMF.

On average, a nurse in the civil service gets roughly about K7, 000 meaning the government would be spending over K90, 000, 000 on the recruits.

Mr Kalaba in an interview said the conditionalities that came with the IMF deal was that the government should not begin the mass recruitment of health workers.

He said the wage bill that came with the 11, 200 was huge and Government would be forced to spend a lot of money just on these workers.

Mr Kalaba said Zambians should not be too excited over the recent advertisement that was done by the government to mean that they had recruited.

He said the IMF was not in favour of the recruitment process and it had told the government that they should not go ahead with it.

“We want to challenge Government to shed more light over this issue because what we understand is that the IMF is not interested in this whole thing,” he said.

Mr Kalaba said he hoped this would not end badly due to the conditionalities from the IMF which clearly stipulated that no workers would be employed.

And Resident Doctors Association of Zambia president Dr Brian Sampa said their call to employ all the doctors that were not working was rescinded because there was need to strike a balance from all sides.

 “We wanted all the unemployed doctors to be employed but it’s a bit tricky since the demand is quite high,” he said.

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