Mozambique: President calls for calm over late wages – Lusa | Watch

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Mozambique: President calls for calm over late wages – Lusa | Watch

9:14 CAT | 11 Aug 2023

Screen grab: Kenya Digital News

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi said on Thursday that the delays in civil service salaries are the result of the Single Salary Table (TSU)coming into force, reiterating that there are no problems with funds and calling for “calm and patience”.

“There are no problems with salaries because of shortages […] the moment of transition [to the Single Salary Table] is bringing these discontinuities that require patience,” noted the head of state, during a press conference in Maputo, at the end of a meeting with Kenyan President William Ruto, who is visiting Mozambique.

Nyusi noted that the transition to the new salary table was a “huge alteration” that “changed people’s lives”, calling for “sufficient calm” so that “gradually the problem is resolved”.

“Let there not be an effort to degrade the system or to take advantage. There must be an environment where people collaborate for the solution,” added Filipe Nyusi, indicating that, despite the salary delays, the new table has brought benefits in some cases.

“I was talking to a citizen yesterday, and he told me that there were doctors who received 52,000 meticais [€738], but now they are above 100,000 meticais [just over €1,000]. So, in this case, when one problem is solved, other problems appear,” he added.

On Monday, the ministry of economy and finance said that delays in salary payments, especially in the police and army, were due to registration problems in the new payment system.

The military and police “had a parallel salary processing system, and it was decided that they also had to migrate to a single state processing,” national director of public accounting Manuel Matavel said at the time.

According to Matavel, 94% of the staff at the ministry of interior have been registered, 97% of whom have already received their June salary, and at the ministry of defence, 95% of employees have been registered, 94% of whom have also received their salary.

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

The Single Salary Table was approved in 2022 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/month (€169 million/month) to 15.8 billion meticais/month (€231 million/month).

The new salary matrix in the state has 21 levels, between 8,756 and 165,758 meticais (between €134 and €2,580), instead of 103 levels, as was previously the case.

Watch President Nyusi address this issue at Thursday press conference ( from 41.08)