Public workers back on strike

Zambia's 120,000 public workers went on a nationwide strike on Tuesday aimed at forcing the government to honour a pay agreement it says it can no longer afford to implement. "We have officially started a countrywide strike because the government seems to be ignoring our demands, even after they signed a collective agreement. The strike we have started today is indefinite and all the workers have responded to it, with some shutting down shop as early as yesterday," Civil Servants and Allied Workers Union of Zambia (CSUZ) secretary-general, Darrison Chaala, told IRIN. This is the second walkout by civil servants in less than two weeks over their demands for a pay rise and a housing allowance. Abel Chambeshi, a senior cabinet minister, accused the unions of being in league with opposition parties out to destabilise the government. "It's not good to mix politics with unionism because the effect of strike actions is bad for the economy... Unions should not allow themselves to be used by politicians," Chambeshi warned. Chaala dismissed the notion of the opposition being behind the industrial action. "The strike is about the government's failure to honour an agreement - to bring in opposition politics is folly," he said. The government of President Levy Mwanawasa agreed to a salary rise and housing benefits for public workers in April. However, faced with a projected US $124 million budget overrun and pressure from donors to close the deficit, the government delayed implementation of the agreement. Earlier this month public workers launched a three-day strike, but returned to work after the government appeared to concede to their demands. Chaala accused the government this week of again reneging on the deal and said this time the strike would be indefinite. But secretary to the cabinet in charge of finance and economic development, David Diangamo, told IRIN the government was "confident this problem will be sorted out" if the unions accepted a smaller remuneration package, "especially on housing allowances". The industrial action is the latest bad news for the government. It follows the dashing of Zambia's hopes of qualifying for debt relief this year under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative due to a combination of factors ranging from overspending to a slowdown in the country's privatisation programme. It costs Zambia around $150 million to $200 million each year to service its $6.5 billion debt. Diangamo said qualifying for debt relief would save around $3.8 billion over the next 20 years. "That is a lot of money. It represents about 60 percent of the total foreign debt stock, but there is no use crying over spilt milk. The main reason for not qualifying is because of some donor concerns over privatisation and the projected budget overrun ... but as far as we're concerned, this is something we can work out." However, the anti-debt NGO Jubilee Zambia said the country's inability to qualify for debt relief this year was a serious blow. "This clearly goes to show that the solutions our creditors give to our unsustainable debt problems greatly lack substance and are unable to work. The budget overrun, which is being cited as one of the reasons Zambia has to miss out on debt relief, is responsible for only about two percent of the national budget ... is it fair to punish almost 10 million people because of such an issue?" asked Jubilee spokeswoman, Charity Musamba. It was a sentiment shared by Gregory Chikwakwa of the Civil Society for Poverty Reduction. "The suffering of the majority of Zambians is definitely ignored by the western bilateral and multilateral donors when they make a decision to deny us debt relief. What this means is that money that could have gone towards poverty reduction will now be going towards debt servicing, and poverty reduction [programmes] will suffer again because the West has changed the goal posts," he told IRIN. One of the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund for winning debt relief was that Zambia was to have completely privatised the state-owned Zambia National Commercial Bank and the power utility, the Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation (ZESCO). Instead of selling all its shares in the national bank, the government disposed of 49 percent, while Mwanawasa preferred to commercialise ZESCO rather than offering it to the market. "The government did not stick to the letter of intent they wrote to the IMF," Ignatius Chicha, a senior economic analyst with Citibank Zambia told IRIN. "But the situation is not as bad as it has been made to appear ... Zambia will still qualify in a year or so if they focus on benchmarks."