PF is killing Workers with wage freeze – Percy Chanda

The announcement by Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda that the wage freeze will be implemented even in 2015 was actually made during the presentation of the 2014 budget in parliament last year.

UPND, warned the Zambian people that the wage freeze would hurt most Zambian families especially that the PF had removed fuel and mealie meal subsidies. The subsidies were acting as a cushion to ameliorate the high cost of living.

The PF government and Mr. Chikwanda should not punish innocent Zambians for his reckless borrowing and myopic planning in national economic matters.

It is not the people of Zambia that forced Hon. Chikwanda to recklessly and corruptly dish out contracts for roads and bridges even when he had no money to pay and now wants to lamp the burden on the already heavily taxed but poorly paid Zambian workers.

UPND does not believe in a confrontational approach to solving issues such as demonstrations as ZCTU and its affiliates now want to do. But in a situation where dialogue fails as has been the case with the PF government that does not believe in round-table discussions, we have no choice but to support the workers in addressing their grievances because confrontation is the only language the PF understands.

We all know PF won elections on, among other lies, ‘more money in your pockets and lower taxes’ slogan. How does Chikwanda, who has imposed a wage freeze, reconcile this slogan with the real life for the Zambian workers and the firms that employ them?

Indeed, workers were promised more money and got a 52% increment in the 2014 budget towards personal emoluments and this pressure extended to private sector who had to match the civil servants salary increments by implementing a mandatory minimum wage.

But simple economics dictated that the firms equally had to increase cost of goods and services to raise money to meet these wages and this was coupled with a high cost of doing business after the removal of fuel subsidies.

The PF and Mr. Chikwanda’s poor and outdated economic measures are what we are seeing now where the cost of essential commodities and generally the cost of living is unbearable, the Kwacha is very weak, hospitals are poorly funded, and the education sector is in tatters. You know that your education sector is in tatters when students start committing suicide due to lack of bursaries.

There is no way we can have a wage freeze when electricity tariffs have increased, water tariffs increase, fees increased, and transport costs have increased.

UPND and my president Hakainde Hichilema, we resolved to first robustly grow the economy above 10% GDP through agriculture, mining, tourism and manufacturing (including agro processing) sectors with right incentives and this will increase employment sources, widen the tax and export base. The money generated from these sectors will then be used to support the social sectors such as education, health and develop road and other infrastructure without resorting to reckless borrowing.

Let me reiterate this, when Government closes its doors to collective bargaining and resorts to heavy handedness, the way Chikwanda is doing, the only way is to withdraw one’s services. So ZCTU and other unions are on firm ground to compel this Government to come to the table and give our civil service decent wages and this is fully supported by UPND.

Percy Chanda

UPND- Chairperson for Labour