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Feb. 25, 2022

EDITOR

3 min read

No shame with taxpayers’ money

No shame with taxpayers’ money

The National Assembly of Lesotho

Story highlights

    Both civil servants and Parliamentarians are cut from the same cloth
    Workers through their unions, are basically contradicting their own principles

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IT is amazing how trade unionists are holding government to ransom over pay increases at a time when the majority of the people go to bed on empty stomachs.

They are just too comfortable because they have a regular income when many Basotho would be grateful to have a meal at least once a day.

Civil servants, police, teachers and the rest of them are counting their losses based on previous financial years without a five percent increase when their neighbours and relatives would be happy to have enough coins to buy a loaf of bread.

They are doing a pretty good job singling out members of parliament as greedy with their M5 000 pocket money, when in fact they are cut from the same cloth.

The spirit of unionists is the same spirit of legislators except that there is an overlap, and the specifics of the similarities would be interesting. The ideology undergirding both state employees and parliamentarians is that of power, as it invariably will be.

Their intention is to seize the state machinery, attain its control and loot when the major problem facing this country is a bloated wage bill. Civil servants, through their unions, are basically contradicting their own principles - asking for more money where there is none.    

It may take us a while to get our heads around their claim that there is money because MPs are taking it for themselves and the utterance can only add to anarchy and yet both parties have no shame playing a tug of war with taxpayers ‘money.

It is not clear if politics as played by government workers is any different as practised by politicians, more like loose themes and perceptions. The main game here is appealing to the emotions of the people through the media and public fora, however that sounds, to a point where we all dance to their music, no matter how disgusting and repulsive it may all be.

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It is not simply that the protesters are underpaid just that they have become political and dumbed down around themes such as corruption versus pay increment, galvanised along the principles of entitlement. It would be more interesting to dig around these set of beliefs of either side to constructing an underlying philosophy – greed.

If state workers win this one and get a pay rise on Friday, this won’t be a war won to earn a decent living wage but it would be a war won to outstrip the enemy of his royal crown.

People have been led to focus on a nearly non-existent economic threat when in actual fact it is an internal affair over the use of state resources.

This is the state of the Lesotho politics war. Guys get smashed over, form into coalitions, win the contention and so it becomes a vicious circle. Going to war of words with government has become a sinister joke but our children will turn into rascals (Manomoro), our courts of law will become a hive of gamblers and our country will be reduced into a banana republic.      

 

 

 

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