LOCAL Government Service Commission Chairperson Ackson Sejani says pilferage has contributed to the non-payment of salaries at the Lusaka City Council. Addressing a press briefing in Lusaka this week, Mr Sejani said the reason the local authority had delayed to clear its workers was because some employees were pilfering and not submitting revenue to the council. We do not agree.
Mr Sejani’s explanation could have been acceptable if he had provided details about the amount
that could have been pilfered and how it affected the council’s projected income. We do not think the so-called pilferage could cause the Lusaka City Council, the country’s largest local authority to fail to meet its wage bill.
The new dawn administration prides itself on having ended caderism at markets and bus station which was rife during the Patriotic Front tenure. It has boasted that because of having removed political cadres who were collecting levies illegally instead of the council, the local authority – like others throughout the country – has seen an improvement in revenue collection thus making it easy to pay the workers. If anything, Mr Sejani should have explained why the council was failing to take disciplinary action against workers who were not submitting revenue to the council. Mr Sejani at his media briefing said some of the people who were complaining were the ones pilfering but were complaining the loudest.
“Yes, I can confirm that workers are not being paid but the workers themselves are causing this
problem because some workers are stealing from the council. But the pilferage will be addressed,”
he said.
He said some workers were in the habit of duplicating receipts and in the process pocketed the revenue they collected. “Some workers were not remitting revenue which has greatly crippled the operations of the council resulting in the non-payment of salaries,” he said. This is the more reason why Mr Sejani should take the Lusaka City Council top management to task for failing to look after resources especially after having identified the culprits. We do not think Zambians would buy into his explanation of the Lusaka City Council failing to pay workers due to pilferage just as they rejected the explanation from the Ministry of Health that the shortage of medicines in hospitals was due to pilferage by health workers. It is the politicisation of the system in which qualified people are looked at through political lenses and shunted aside that has disrupted service delivery in the public service.
Mr Sejani cannot claim that some top management officials were not performing to expectations
and that they were failing to meet targets when one of his first tasks when he was appointed was to
carry out a thorough labour audit cum cleansing at the Lusaka council.
