Zimbabwe’s economic crisis worsening with each passing day has forced the Apex Council, an umbrella body for all civil servants worker representatives to notify government of its intention to down tools due to incapacity to report for duty.
In a letter dated 8 January 2019 and addressed to the chairperson of the Public Service Commission (PSC), the Apex Council said its members are incapacitated to report for work.
“The Apex Council representing the entire civil service hereby serve a notice of a collective job action within the next 14 days from the date of this letter.
“The reason for this step is premised on the incapacitation of our members and the failure by government to address the same. The incapacitation comes in the wake of the erosion of our static salaries due to the sky rocketing cost of living.
“Despite numerous meetings being held between the government and staff associations, there has not been any tangible results to date,” read the letter.
In a joint press briefing yesterday, Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) and Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) reiterated that they will not accept salaries in Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGs) demanding to be paid in United States dollars.
The impasse between the government and its civil workforce appear to be far from over with the government maintaining that it has no capacity to pay workers’ salaries in United States Dollar.
Meanwhile, President Emmerson Mnangagwa is set to resume his foreign trips and scheduled to travel to Belarus, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and Russia this week.
Mnangagwa will end up in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) for his second appearance since taking over from former head of state Robert Mugabe.
The President’s foreign trips have drew criticism from former Bulawayo senator David Coltart who charged that Mnangagwa’s globetrotting manifest extravaganza in the second republic.
“So whilst Zimbabwe is burning and a national civil servants’ strike is threatened Mnangagwa swans off to a variety of former soviet bloc countries and glitzy Davos (no doubt in an expensive Swiss plane). This is irresponsibility and profligacy writ large,” Coltart wrote on his micro blog Twitter today.
