Open letter to His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zambia Dr Hakainde Hichilema
C/O Department of Development Studies
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of Zambia
August 29, 2024
Mr President Sir,
SAVE US FROM DISCRIMINATION IN THE PAYMENT OF GRATUITIES AND PENSION BENEFITS
I am down on my knees Mr. President Sir, pleading with you Sir, to help us by stepping in and stopping the current discrimination in the payment of gratuities and pension benefits among government employees.
It is evidently clear that the government is favoring civil servants against its other workers in Government owned and controlled public institutions. The discrimination can never be justified. Not even the national challenges recently mentioned by the Hon Minister of Education as the reason for the discrimination can. It is a well-known Humanitarian and democratic principle that national resources no matter how meager, must be shared equally and in accordance with beneficiaries’ social and legal entitlements. Discrimination undermines human dignity. It is a gross violation of Fundamental Human Rights as enshrined in the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. The current discrimination is deprivation. It is a denial of the inalienable right of human beings to access basic essentials of life. It is also an affront to certain ILO conventions ratified by the Republic of Zambia and which has remained in force to the current day.
Mr. President Sir, at your July 2023 meeting with Anglican Bishops at State House, you rightly considered the plight of retirees, long deprived of their benefits and declared that henceforth, retirees will receive their terminal benefits just three months after they retire. You also disclosed that your administration had already paid the majority of retirees who had been waiting for their benefits up to 20 years. Little did some of us know that this gesture of good will on your part, would exclude retirees like me who served in government owned and controlled public universities
Mr. President Sir, on paragraph 239 of the 2024 Budget Speech by the Hon. Minister of Finance and National Planning, it is stated that the waiting period for receipt of pension has been reduced to three months from three years and above, yet no such changes has taken place at UNZA and other public Institutions. For instance I have had three unpaid gratuities since July 2016 and none of them has been paid to me to date. We are not only being inflicted with prolonged suffering from want, but no consideration is being given to the fact the more we wait, the more our already meager entitlements get eroded.
Mr. President Sir, only a couple of weeks ago, the Hon Minister of Education disclosed, in his press statement dated July 11, 2024, that all civil servants in direct government employment have been paid all their benefits. He went further to state that the government would have loved to clear those in statutory bodies too, had it not been for the national debt, the current drought and other challenges Zambia is facing.
Mr. President Sir, as you well know, the scarcity of national resources cannot be used as a rationale for concentrating such resources on some favored groups at the expense of the less favored. Article 1 of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights stresses that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and should use the reason and conscience they are endowed with to act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 7 indicates that all are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination. Article 22 says in part that everyone as a member of society has the right to social security and is entitled to its realisation through national effort in accordance with the organisation and resources of each state. Article 23.3 partly says that everyone has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. Article 12.2 of the of the ILO Convention C095-Protection of Wages Convention 1949 which Zambia ratified on October 23, 1979 and which is still in force, reads as follows; “Upon the termination of a contract of employment, a final settlement of all wages due shall be effected in accordance with national laws or regulations, collective agreement or arbitration award or, in the absence of any applicable law, regulation, agreement or award, within a reasonable period of time having regard to the terms of the contract.”
In fact Mr. President bearing in mind the necessity of equity in the distribution of national resources the Hon Minister of Education himself, spoke against the folly of concentrating government resources on UNZA alone when they were eight other public universities requiring government assistance. In this regard he proceeded to announce allocations to four other public universities as well.
Mr. President Sir, I now wish to turn to the effects the long run discrimination in the payment of benefits has had especially on retirees at UNZA. Because of government’s scant payments to UNZA overtime, the number of unpaid retirees has been allowed to grow to unmanageable levels, something that should have never been allowed if the government and UNZA had committed themselves to paying workers as they retired. As the Hon Minister of Education disclosed in his press statement, UNZA staff debt had risen to a staggering K 1.385 Billion. The breakdown of this debt speaks volumes about what caused it. K617 Million is owed to ZSIC superannuation. K208 Million is owed to NAPSA. This means that the cause for the escalation was insufficient government funding which only permitted UNZA to pay salaries and not remittances to pension houses. Only the rest of the debt is owed to individual current and former members of staff in terms of gratuities and pensions.
Mr. President Sir, the K206, 312, 322.00 that UNZA received from government lately compared to K 1.385 Billion is in actual fact, a drop in the ocean because it still left a staggering K 1.18 Billion debt balance. This meager grant paid only 84 retirees out of a total 308 and only 386 gratuities out of a total of 1, 487.
Even worse Mr. President Sir, the manner it was distributed, was without regard to the gravity of the matter on the ground. The Hon Minister had directed that K131 million be used to pay retirees who are still on the Institution’s payroll and some of who are no longer in the service of the university, while the remaining K75 million be used to pay gratuities to both current and former employees of the University. He suggested the breakdown of payments as follows: A total of 71 pensioners, 386 gratuities, 12 deceased persons and one medical case bringing the total to only 470 cases. In terms of the actual disbursements, 84 instead of the suggested 71 retirees have been earmarked for payments the cut point being December 27, 2020. On the other hand, the cut point for gratuity within which others and I fall, is as remote as April 30, 2016.
Sir, Just as much as it is well for the government and UNZA to save money by prioritizing the removal of non-serving pensioners from the payroll it is equally necessary to end the destitution of those retirees like me, whom the University had removed from the payroll following the end of our last employment contracts. If indeed as the Hon. Minister said, the rationale was to free resources for onward payment of other would be retirees, we are yet to see which retiree will ever be paid from UNZA’s own savings.
Mr. President Sir, the fact that Public Service Management Division Circular B25 of April 8, 2022 directed all government institutions to remove from the pay roll, their former contract employees who had been retained on it, pending payment of their gratuities, should have been the more reason why serious consideration should have been given to those former employees like me who have been removed from the payroll and left without any meaningful source of livelihood. After all Mr. President, as a counter measure to the directive, the same circular goes further to direct all employers to ensure that gratuity is paid on expiry or termination of contract, so why was this aspect not considered when some money was made available? In all fairness therefore, there should have been no waiting list for retiring contract empoyees.
Mr. President Sir, this discrimination is killing us. It has deprived us of our entitlement to our hard earned gratuities and pensions. It has denied us our only opportunity to plan for our next survival strategies upon termination of our jobs and removal from our former employers’ pay rolls. It has thrown us into destitution and consequently stripped us of our dignity as human beings. The unbearable amount of suffering we are going through , while knowing full well that our former employers are holding on to our money, which is our only source of livelihoods, and not knowing when they will release it to us, is causing us the most unbearable physical and mental torture.
Finally Mr. President Sir, also consider doing something now, especially for those of us who are owed gratuities and are no longer on our former employers’ payrolls.
Yours Faithfully,
Tiyaonse Kabwe
RETIRED LECTURER
UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA
cc Special Assistant to the President for Press and Public Relations
State House
Lusaka
Open letter to His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zambia Dr Hakainde Hichilema
