Mozambique: Overtime payments will be staggered, says Minister

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Mozambique: Overtime payments will be staggered, says Minister

7:30 CAT | 09 Jun 2025

File photo: Lusa

The Mozambican government has promised that it will pay teachers and health workers for overtime worked in the past – but not all at once.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, the government spokesperson, Minister for State Administration Inocêncio Impissa, said the government is implementing forms of “proportional payment” for overtime.

Failure to pay for overtime has been a cancer at the heart of the education and health services, leading to repeated strikes, go-slows and threats of more strikes.

Impissa promised that the government will continue to pay for overtime but asked education and health workers to show “patience and understanding”.

He was asking for patience, because those affected “are public servants like us, and we have announced, after the resumption of overtime payments, the forms in which this will be done”.

Impissa stressed it was not possible to pay the amounts owing all at once, so, in light of the government’s scarcity of resources, it had opted for “proportional payment”.

He added that in the next batch of overtime payments, those who have already received some of what is owing to them will not receive any more, but will have to give way to “those who are still in the queue”.

In the next phase, Impissa admitted, nobody will receive all the money owing, but everybody would receive something. So no teacher or health worker should expect to receive what he called “astronomical sums”. If overtime pay owed to a teacher over a period of years now amounted to 300,000 or 400,000 meticais, and he was expecting to receive the money in a lump sum to buy a car or a motor-cycle, he would be disappointed, the Minister said.

Source: AIM