Finance and Economic Development Minister Mthuli Ncube said that an increase in civil servants’ salaries will not be benchmarked to an exchange rate, which is currently at 1:8.
Ncube had earlier mentioned that the government has accumulated a surplus of about RTGS$600 million.
This prompted Harare North MP Allan Markham to ask why the Minister has not used the surplus to give civil servants a meaningful increase.
In response to the query raised during the question and answer session in Parliament on Wednesday, Ncube said:
First of all, when you think of salary adjustments for the civil servants, we never benchmark to an exchange rate to the USD in which case he’s used a parallel market rate of 1:8. We don’t do that. We try to benchmark salaries to the inflation level and that is how it ought to be done.
Secondly, should we give civil servants an increase in line with the exchange rate which some Members of Parliament are mentioning? The answer is no.
We’ll continue to engage the civil servants and it will be an increase that begins to ameliorate against the current levels of inflation and we’ll continue to engage them so that we can adjust their emoluments both in monetary and non-monetary terms.