Good afternoon. Two news items today give an update on the government’s long-running attempts to reduce waste and overspending on public sector jobs. Yesterday, transport minister João Matlombe announced that at least 80 jobs would be cut at the state-owned airline LAM, and prime minister Maria Benvinda Levi announced that promotion and career progression was being reintroduced into the civil service, having been frozen previously to deal with an emergency level of overspend on public sector wages. That, in turn, was caused by the deeply flawed implementation of the so-called “single salary table” (TSU) pay scale, which was intended to simplify public sector pay but instead ended up increasing the cost of the wage bill. Opportunistic civil servants took advantage of the new and unfamiliar system to argue for more money.
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Both LAM and the TSU are a work in progress. LAM has been a victim of the culture in which people with good connections in the ruling Frelimo party are able to secure public sector jobs for their relatives and friends, regardless of whether there are actual jobs that need doing. Although Matlombe has only confirmed the cutting of 80 jobs at the airline, the government has identified 500 surplus employees in total, many of whom, including pilots, are being paid to stay at home and not work. In fact, thanks to corruption and patronage, LAM’s workforce (a rather misleading term) has ballooned from around 800 to around 900 in the last two years. It is highly likely therefore that further job cuts will be announced later.
