Junta announces anti-corruption pay hikes for civil servants

Civil servants will be able to celebrate the New Year in Mauritania safe in the knowledge that their pay packets will be 50 percent thicker come 1 January. The Mauritanian head of state, Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, announced the wage adjustments on Wednesday. The pay rises are intended to crack down on corruption, he said. The changes are intended to create “adequate conditions for the establishment of social justice and the implementation of the principle of good governance for a more equitable distribution of the national wealth,” said Vall. The government has also promised to slash a 30 percent income tax, known locally as the ITS tax. That tax is levied on salaries of all government and private sector employees. Civil servant and military pensions will also be increased by 15 percent. In March, former president Maaouya Ould Taya announced a six-fold pay rise back-dated to January for government ministers, also in a bid to tackle corruption, he said. But this failed to do the trick and the military government that ousted Taya in an August coup cited government corruption as their main motivation. Vall’s junta has promised to restore democracy to the Islamic Republic and scheduled elections for March 2007. The new measures come days after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced Mauritania’s exclusion from a list of 20 countries that qualified for 100 percent debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC). Mauritania could again be incorporated into the HIPC programme as soon as “required policy options are taken,” said Thomas Dawson, IMF’s director of external relations earlier this month. In 2002, the IMF calculated that servicing debt cost the Mauritanian economy the equivalent of 36 percent of annual export earnings. But in early 2006, economic growth is set to rocket in Mauritania as the desert nation’s first deep-sea oil well begins production. The reduction of the widely disliked ITS tax was welcomed in the dusty capital Nouakchott. “I welcome the cutting of the ITS tax, which represented a 30 percent claw-back of worker’s salaries. The reduction of the ITS has been a union demand for more than a decade,” said trade union leader Mohamed Salem. But Salem warned that inflation, which has soared since oil investment started flowing into the country, also needs to be tackled if the benefits are to have any lasting effect. “If this cut is accompanied by a stabilisation of the price of basic goods, these measures will go a long way to helping workers and maintaining social stability.”