The Minister of Economy and Finance said this Thursday, 30 November, in Parliament that the new Single Wage Scale (TSU) has put a brake on the payment of overtime in the Public Administration, but assured that these remunerations will be settled in full.
“The TSU has created a discontinuity in the trajectory of overtime pay established in 2021,” said Max Tonela, speaking in Parliament in response to questions from the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), the third largest party, about teachers’ complaints about the lack of this pay.
The government official admitted, however, that the introduction of the TSU generated a huge financial effort for the public accounts, undermining the commitment to regularise the payment of overtime work.
“There was a significant effort to regularise pending situations that accumulated between 2018 and 2021,” he said.
For the 2021 financial year, the government has implemented control measures in the payment system, “adapting the practice of paying overtime worked in the current month in the following month”, he emphasised.
Emphasising that the payment of overtime has been a persistent problem that the government has managed over the years, the Minister of Economy and Finance maintained that the settlement of these charges is subject to a “careful process of verification, validation and budgetary availability”.
The source pointed out that the use of overtime is motivated by the lack of human resources in some sectors of the Public Administration, namely education and health.
“Another factor is the need to improve the institutions’ internal control process to avoid the systematic accumulation of liabilities. In this sense, priority is being given to the payment of basic salaries and other supplements,” he added.
On Monday (27), the Minister of Education and Human Development, Carmelita Namashulua, said that the payment of overtime to teachers is being made “gradually”, assuring that the delays in payment are not affecting final exams.
“The process is happening. As the inspectorate checks and validates, payments are gradually being made. It’s not an isolated case, as it’s a general situation for teachers in our schools and throughout the country this issue is being resolved at central level.”
The Single Salary Table (TSU) was approved in 2022 with the aim of eliminating asymmetries and keeping the state’s wage bill under control in the medium term, but the start-up has caused salaries to skyrocket by 36 per cent, from an expenditure of 11.6 billion meticais per month to 15.8 billion meticais per month.
The new state salary matrix has 21 levels, from 8756 to 165 758 meticais, instead of 103 steps, as was previously the case.
