By Habib Bah
Three major policy options are open to government to achieve the equitable distribution of public wealth in the Gambia: public service pay scale, labour regulations on remunerations and taxation. The goals of such policies should be to accord citizens a minimum living wage, ensure equal pay for equal work and minimize income disparities.
Somebody once said African governments pretend to pay their workers while these workers also pretend to work. This is in many ways true of the Gambia. Under current economic circumstances to pay any worker less than GMD 15,000.00 per month is an affront to human dignity. Yet government’s approved pay scale for 2019 which is the best since independence shows basic earnings ranging from GMD 2,592.00 to GMD17, 907.00. The majority of government workers have only a transport allowance of GMD 1,500.00 added to their basic salary followed by deductions, at least for income tax. These people go to work every day with hawkish attitude seeking any means to make ends meet. The vehicles’ fuel is undercut, overtimes and treks faked, overseas travel opportunities relentlessly fished out, free food and allowance giving workshops chased after, purchases are inflated in quantity and price, contracts are entered into with inflated prices, bogus committees with sitting allowances are set up, bribes are sought after, public revenue documents like receipts and forms are forged, among other anomalies. Workers continuously juggle to place themselves at advantageous positions to rip the biggest harvests using what seniority they have to their best advantage in this scramble for public resources. Squabbles erupt in some government offices resulting from the scramble for access and control of resources which divide staff into antagonistic factions, each jealously guarding its interests. Vendettas become decision factors for government officials rather than purely the achieving of government objectives. Clearly low salaries have created a culture of dishonesty and waste rather than an incentive to work and government need to realize that costs are not saved but multiplied by them. Besides, a human rights case against the government can be made out of such salaries and it can be hoped that the National Human Rights Council will consider taking this issue with government.
Taking cue from government a number of private enterprises and civil society organizations pay similarly miserable or worst salaries to their workers, some of whom have salaries equal to or less than their daily fares to work and resort to lift seeking to get to and from work. This amounts to sub-slavery. It is the responsibility of any government to protect not just the lives and properties but also the dignity of the citizenry. Therefore government needs to put its house in order on the salaries issue and pass laws requiring all employers in the formal sector to adequately remunerate their employees. Laws should also be enacted to ensure gradual formalization of all players in the informal sector by for example setting criteria which when met will require, besides registration, the employment of the services of accountants and auditors on full or part time basis. This can by itself create employment opportunities for freelance accountants and auditors and make for fairer taxation.
Equal pay for equal work is a universal value that just-minded people everywhere seek to achieve. In the Gambia remuneration from public revenue go to employees in four categories of institutions: central government, sub-vented institutions, projects and local government authorities. The pay scale discussed above relate to central government employees who are to be found handling positions in various ministries and departments of government. There are also in this category those on what is called fixed grades with monthly basic salaries ranging currently from GMD 22,500.00 to GMD 44,000.00 for those shown on the annual estimates.
Sub-vented institutions are usually offshoots of government departments that take over some of the functions of the department and are set up with the intention that these should eventually become self-financing and self-governing institutions that support government achieve its development goals. They have their own boards that run their affairs usually chaired by the permanent secretaries of the relevant ministries. The employees of these institutions are usually paid far more, two to three or more times, than their counterparts in central government. These salaries, determined by the boards, are not shown in the estimates as they are embedded in the lump sum subvention figures for sub-vented institutions. I am not aware of any official guidelines on the setting of the salaries of these institutions. When government declares salary increase of 50% it is possible for their staffs’ increase alone to be more than the whole new increased salaries of their counterparts in central government. The fact is that too many of these institutions have not succeeded in becoming self-reliant. Instead their dependence on government revenue keep getting bigger year after year as well as their wage bills.
A minister of government once remarked to a group that included myself that the allowances of some of the staffs of the projects under his ministry alone were far more than his own total remuneration as a minister.
All this goes to show that central government staff are the least paid, woefully at that, than all other workers remunerated with public funds. This situation has created great staffing problems for some government departments. For example, the Accountant General’s Department has been virtually reduced to a helpless free recruitment and training agency whose highly trained staff, some of them trained abroad at the Department’s budget, frequently leave, sometimes en masse, to such sub-vented institutions as the Gambia Revenue Authority and National Audit Office in pursuit of the much higher rates of remuneration there. The question arises as to what message this sends to central government workers? Is their work of less value to the country or are they less human than those in other branches of government? Until this issue is resolved every government in power needs to attempt to answer this question. It should be appreciated that central government workers are being discriminated against in terms of remuneration which is unconstitutional and they are demeaned which is inhuman. Government needs to take steps to right this wrong. It is only equitable that all workers remunerated with public funds come under the same pay scale, albeit one that is a far improvement on the existing central government pay scale. The payment of all such salaries should be by the treasury unit of the Accountant General’s department. Additionally differences in fixed allowances for workers on the same grade should never be allowed to be more than 50%, if at all. Institutions that want to have a separate pay scale and to be self-accounting should ensure they wean themselves from dependence on public funding. In fact no institution should be allowed to have sub-vented status that does not have the potential to become independent of public funding within 3 to 5 years of its creation except for tuition-free educational institutions.
Finally government must prevent the potential for profiteering by businesses operating in the country to the detriment of the wider population by ensuring that at least 60% of their earnings benefit permanent Gambian residents either directly through staff remuneration or indirectly through increases in public services arising from increases in government revenue. This can easily be achieved by employing an appropriate corporation tax regime as follows.
Corporation tax payable should be the higher of:
- Corporation tax under current tax regime and
- 60% of earnings before tax less total remuneration expenses (excluding expatriate remunerations).
This will in my view not only discourage the employment of expatriates instead of Gambians but will also encourage businesses to pay higher remunerations and / or employ more people. And government has at the same time nothing to lose.
Adequate and equitable remuneration of workers backed by an appropriate business tax regime is necessary for an effective government system that is capable of bringing about genuine development of the country, an even distribution of public wealth and improvements in the living standards of the population in general.
(P.S. Look forward to part 4 of this series entitled ‘Call for Change of Attitudes’ coming soon. Stay tuned.)