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The end of the calendar year is when many formally employed
Zimbabweans, especially civil servants, expect to be paid a bonus in the form
of a ‘thirteenth cheque.’ Can the country still afford this popular, deeply
entrenched entitlement?
To even ask the question is to invite the possibility of
being stoned to death in public. The automatic 13th cheque has long
gone beyond being a ‘thank you’ for loyal service to being a social
expectation. An employer, especially government, has to offer an unusually
compelling reason for not offering it. Even then, there will still be hell to pay
for the employer for a long time for breaking the bonus rule, whatever the
reason.
Private companies can plead poor performance during the year
as a reason for not offering a 13th cheque bonus. However, it takes
unusually good relations and communication between management and workers for
this to be believed, and for it not to result in tensions and even lower
productivity the following year.
There are significant short term social and economic effects
to the annual bonus. For instance, a newspaper recently reported how some
retail shops are inflating their prices in anticipation of many consumers
having more spending money in November and December. Coupled with the end of
the year holidays and general consumerist hoopla, this is the short but
important calendar period when some sectors of the retail economy make a
disproportionate amount of their annual income, making up for the comparatively
slow rest of the year.
Civil servants are the biggest single block of Zimbabwe’s
formally employed. Their influence goes faster beyond their numbers, said to be
in the low hundreds of thousands. Their salaries may be relatively low compared
to the private sector (another reason bonuses in government have become an
ameliorating expectation) but they are stably, reliably employed.
For this reason retailers to whom credit sales are an
important part of their bottom line can feel much more confident about
extending stretched out sales terms to civil servants than they would be to, for instance, the
many self employed in today’s Zimbabwe, some of whom may earn more but don’t have the
all-important, re-assuring monthly ‘pay slip.’ for civil servants, the credit sales and monthly
deductions can be arranged directly through their employer, government, making
them fairly safe and trouble free for the retail shop.
With the society’s intricate extended family system, the
benefits of the bonus extend far and wide as many of the formally employed
visit their rural areas for the end of year holidays. Farming relatives who
might struggle to afford seed and fertilizer for the just-started cropping
season can look forward to assistance from salaried relatives, who obviously are
in a better position to offer such help during ‘bonus season.’
There is little doubt that the annual bonus represents a
significant ‘stimulus package’ for the economy. It is particularly welcome at a
time of continuing but early recovery from a ten year recession.
On the other hand, the country is technically ‘broke,’ as we
are frequently reminded. Given Zimbabwe’s
struggling economy, civil servants and salaried employees in general are the
privileged few in many respects, regardless of their complaints about their
salary and other work conditions.
For a country still in deep economic trouble struggling to
find ways to dig itself out, is an automatic 13th cheque salary
bonus, for government employees in particular, defensible? Are not other, more
innovative and economically realistic ways to ‘reward’ civil servants required?
Among other civil service ‘incentive’ schemes recently in
the news are a reported proposal to allow them duty free vehicle imports (an
idea apparently then shot down). A farming inputs purchase scheme was announced
for them last week. There are no doubt various other programmes to soften what
are seen as the unique ‘sacrifices’ of being a civil servant. These various schemes may be a lot more realistic,
particularly for a country in Zimbabwe’s
dire economic situation, than the idea of an automatic bonus.
‘Bonus’ suggests ‘extra,’ both in terms of the performance
of the person receiving it as well as in the means of the entity offering it.
No one even pretends that the Zimbabwe-style bonus is in any way related to
extra or unusual performance. It is an entitlement programme given to everybody
regardless of their performance on the job. How then can such a programme be justified in a particularly
low-productivity country, and one that is economically on its knees?
No politician dares cross the civil servants, and many
actively line up to be on their good side, especially with an election in the
offing. At the beginning of the year President Robert Mugabe, apparently
speaking unilaterally, promised civil servants a salary increase to come from
the country’s new cash cow, Marange diamonds. The finance minister tried to
argue that the country couldn’t afford that yet, but that was not a fight he
could sustain or win as all parts of the body politic scramble to get their hands on
diamond revenue.
The salary increment deal negotiated for civil servants
earlier in the year had a provision for an end of the year (now) review. In
addition, last week arch Mugabe rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, is
reported to have ‘promised’ civil servants a bonus from diamond revenue. Was he
speaking off the cuff, or had he checked with his party’s finance minister,
Tendai Biti, to verify that all was in place for such a bonus?
Long before these politicians have thought of any plan to
put the country’s finite asset of diamond revenue to productive use for the
country’s long term benefit, they have no trouble parceling it out for
consumption purposes. This certainly makes them typical politicians, but hardly
great leaders.
A representative of a civil service union, when asked, said
he had heard nothing to suggest that the bonus would not be paid, and that they
were expecting it. That is to be expected from the union’s virepoint, but from
a broader national perspective, this is not a year when there can be anything
necessarily ‘automatic’ about a government bonus. There have been countless
needs the country has had to forgo because the money has simply not been
available.
In financial/economic terms, a 13th cheque
‘bonus’ should not be any more automatic than the many other needs the country
has had to do without. However, in political terms it is completely different.
No politician will want to be seen to be taking on the
powerful civil servants. In any case, given the perks for which the political class of all
parties in the current coalition government make sure they get access to, none
of them are in a convincing position to call for austerity from anyone else. It
is perhaps with this knowledge of the political realities in mind that the
union official said he took the granting of the 13th cheque as the
automatic, default position. Which politician is going to dare challenge him?
But if this demonstration of their political power makes
civil service unions happy, it does nothing to take away from the validity of questioning
whether the 13th cheque ‘bonus’-for-everyone is still appropriate
for a country like Zimbabwe.
What does it say for an all-inclusiveness ‘bonus’ to be
given to every salaried government employee when that same government also says
the country is broke? If we are giving ourselves automatic ‘extras’ in the form
of a 13th cheque when the country/economy/government really cannot
afford it, under what sort of circumstances are we going to make sacrifices for
the good of the country?
For Zimbabweans who are not civil servants, dealing with any
branch of government can be one of the most stressful, demoralizing
experiences. Sloth, indifference and rudeness abound and are arguably the norm.
The very few civil servants who make any effort to strive above this level of
what Zimbabweans have come to expect from government departments do indeed
deserve a performance ‘thank you’ of one sort or another. But on the contrary, the
current 13th cheque system is actually anti-performance in treating
all government workers ‘equally,’ regardless of their performance. The rude,
under performing civil servant feels every bit as ‘deserving’ of the 13th
cheque as the rare courteous, helpful one. It is now a political entitlement,
not at all a performance bonus.
Government itself has shown that there are many other
effective ways to provide retention or other ‘bonuses,’ rather than just
dishing out cash it does not have, and which could go to citizens who are even needier
than those in salaried employment.
Housing, transport and other allowances, credit guarantees and many
others a few examples. These are quite considerable benefits in a country like Zimbabwe,
and civil servants can be considered quite privileged to being among the tiny
few with access to them. They have the additional benefit for a financially
struggling government/country in not being outright cash grants like a 13th
cheque.
Most of these ‘perks’ are structured in a way that the
government gets all, most or a good part of the investment back. The employee gets
something he would not be able to afford on his or her own on comfortable terms
according to his/her salary, and the employer/country gets (hopefully) the
goodwill and loyalty of the civil servant, as well as repayment in installments of
the cost of the perk. It is win-win in being both a significant incentive for
the worker, as well being ‘affordable’ for the country.
The 13th cheque, on the other hand, may still
have elements of a retention incentive, but by being available to all, it has
absolutely zero aspects of being an incentive to do one’s job better than
before, or than the other person.
What it does do well, is send a message that we as a country
can expect something for nothing even at a time of crisis, and get it. This is
a quality that is usually only associated with the ruling political class, but
the long-entrenched automatic bonus system has spread it to the rest of us. We
don’t have to sacrifice or work harder/better to get ‘extra’ reward: all we
have to do is stretch our political muscles.
The entrenched idea of the automatic 13th ‘bonus’
cheque may be a political hot potato that nobody dares challenge, but it is
arguably a practice that is very much out of step with the vastly changed
Zimbabwean times. At a time that it has been demonstrated that there are
better, more sustainable ways to achieve the purpose for which it was
originally achieved, perhaps the country would benefit from an honest
discussion of its continued usefulness.
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