“We will pay the 13th wherever possible” – Minister of Economy and Finance

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“We will pay the 13th wherever possible” – Minister of Economy and Finance

12:07 CAT | 21 Nov 2017

Voa (File photo) / Adriano Maleiane

Minister of Economy and Finance Adriano Maleiane told the Assembly of the Republic yesterday that “the government’s position is that we want to have employees motivated. Wherever possible, we will pay the 13th salary; we are working to make that happen”.

Minister Maleiane was responding to a suggestion from the Confederation of Economic Associations (CTA) of Mozambique that the government should freeze wages and the 13th month salary in 2018 as a way of mitigating the imbalance in the public account.

Without guaranteeing the payment of the 13th salary, he acknowledged that civil servants “have already made many sacrifices. An average salary of 12,000 meticais is very little”.

During the Fifth Business Environment Monitoring Council, bringing together the private sector, government and cooperation sectors last Friday in Maputo, the chairman of the country’s largest employers’ association said: “In the face of the austerity of public expenditure, we need to go deep into the reforms, to address the imbalances, introducing measures such as the freezing of salary increases in 2018 and suspending the 13th month.”

Agostinho Vuma also advocated the freezing of automatic subsidies and others perks, and freezing automatic promotions for civil servants to counteract growth in operating expenditure.

As regards investment expenditure, he continued, it was imperative to focus on the efficiency of public investment by combining the cost-benefit ratio of infrastructure.

“The combination of this group of measures could increase the efficiency of our economy and improve the productivity of the private sector,” Vuma added, pointed out the need for the government to reduce the use of treasury bills for finance, since it raised interest rates.

“For the private sector, it is important to quickly address the issue of fiscal consolidation as these persistent fiscal risks undermine the business environment,” he said.

“For us it is clear the employees have already made many sacrifices, an average salary of 12,000 meticais is little”

Nevertheless, Minister Adriano Maleiane said on Monday during a parliamentary hearing on the proposed Economic and Social Plan and State Budget for 2018 that the government had no intention of not paying the 13th month of the salary, as happened last year.

“I thought the CTA was saying that it will not be able to pay as an employer, but that is not the government’s position, which is that we want to have the employees motivated, and wherever possible we will pay the 13th salary; we are working to make that happen.”

“For us it is clear the employees have already made many sacrifices. An average salary of 12,000 meticais is very little and has not seen any significant increase, so if we want to make things happen it has to be with the employees. The position of the government is to fulfil, as far as possible, what counts as a right. When people are anticipating something and the government does not say otherwise, it means that we are expecting to comply,” the minister explained.

@Verdade understands that the Confederation of Economic Associations is concerned about the circa 29 billion meticais that the state owes the private sector for goods and services provided in recent years. In addition, the government owes some 8 billion meticais in Value Added Tax refunds, but the real “bosses” see little evidence of the prospective repayment of these amounts in the 2018 State Budget.

Source: A Verdade