Mozambique: Government to pay all police, military salary arrears by end-August

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Mozambique: Government to pay all police, military salary arrears by end-August

6:08 CAT | 16 Aug 2023

File photo: Notícias

Mozambique’s government has promised to complete the payment of overdue salaries of members of the Defence and Security Forces by the end of the month, saying that pending cases have already been verified.

“All efforts are being made to complete the payment of the Defence and Security Forces’ salary arrears,” said the Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Amílcar Tivane, moments after a Cabinet [Conselho de Ministros] meeting in Maputo on Tuesday. “The amounts are available and the process of transferring the amounts to the employees’ accounts is currently underway.”

At stake is an order by Mozambique’s head of state, Filipe Nyusi, issued on Friday, for the payment of members of the Defence and Security Forces whose salary is about two months in arrears to be made again on the previous basis until the problems of “nonconformity detected” in the application of the new salary scale are overcome.

“As long as the platform for special salaries is not yet finalised, the remaining members of the security forces should be paid using the previous process, starting Monday,” Nyusi said on Friday, speaking at the presidential palace. “If you were not able to enter those into the database, pay under the previous system. Then, when you are done, get on board.”

According to Deputy Minister Tivane, payment started over the weekend, but the main goal remains to migrate to the new salary scale.

“We are moving towards a reform and we must focus on these objectives,” said Tivane, adding that an audit by the Ministry of Economy and Finance is also underway that will facilitate the migration process to the new model.

According to previous information from the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the delays in the payment of salaries of the Defence and Security Forces are due to registration problems in the new payment system, taking into account the migration to the single system started in June, which was previously done through the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defence.

During his speech on Friday, Nyusi acknowledged that the country was going through a “very sensitive moment” due to the delays that the application of the new system and its electronic tools to reconcile data was causing in the payment of salaries in the public sector, although the Ministry of Economy and Finance had already guaranteed that 99% of workers have been paid.

READ: Mozambique: Solve wage arrears, even if you have to work all night – AIM | Watch

“The government must relentlessly seek to stabilise and restore wage justice,” Nyusi said. “From this podium, we ask all employees and all Mozambicans to walk together in this courageous march, seeking to solve the problem of those who guarantee the functioning of the state. We need to correct injustices and/or salary discrepancies by introducing methods capable of reducing irregularities that sometimes favour corruption or create inequalities within or between equivalent professional careers.”

The implementation of the new salary scale in the civil service is being strongly contested by several classes of professionals, especially doctors, who have been on strike for a month, providing only a skeleton services.

The new salary scale (TSU) was approved in 2022 in order to eliminate asymmetries and keep the state’s wage bill under control in the medium term, but the start-up caused salaries to skyrocket by about 36%, from 11.6 billion meticais (€169 million) a month to 15.8 billion meticais (€231 million) a month.

The new scale for public sector employees’ monthly salaries has 21 levels, ranging between 8,756 meticais and 165,758 meticais (between €134 and €2,580) instead of 103 steps, as was previously the case.

Source: Lusa