The Mozambican government expects the application of the Single Wage Table (TSU) to have an impact of 28.4 billion meticais on next year’s State Budget (OE).
In the documents supporting the proposal for the Economic and Social Plan and State Budget (PESOE) for 2024, under discussion in Parliament, the Executive forecasts the impact of the application of this measure, taking into account the initial forecast of 19.2 billion meticais, alleging “some inconformities throughout the process of framing civil servants”.
The TSU defines and harmonizes rules and criteria for setting the remuneration of public services, holders and members of Public Bodies and the Administration of Justice, “with the main objective of decompressing the wage bill to levels compatible with budgetary sustainability, thus creating fiscal space to meet other types of expenditure, such as investments,” explains the government.
“However, given the need to reduce the value of the impact to the level initially envisaged, the Executive has been implementing additional measures,” reads the document, which gives as examples the audit of the payroll of civilian and military state employees and agents, the review of management, representation and location allowances, the retirement process of 25,278 state employees and agents or the “rationalization of new admissions”.
“These measures are essentially aimed at reducing the overall impact of the policy to approximately what was envisaged when it was implemented,” the document adds, noting that “as a result of the exercise”, in order to “reduce the wage bill and other personnel costs”, these measures are set at more than 199.3 billion meticais in the 2024 State Budget, the equivalent of 13 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), one percentage point less than budgeted for this year.
In addition, with the implementation of the TSU, the government says it hopes to “improve its processes for programming expenditure on wages and salaries”, lowering the wage bill ratios from the previous 15 percent of GDP to 14.4 percent this year and 12.5 percent this year. percent in 2024, “in line with international and regional parameters”.
The application of the new salary scale in the Civil Service is being strongly contested by various professional classes, including doctors, judges and teachers.
The 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 percent, from spending 11.6 billion meticais a month to 15.8 billion meticais a month.
The new state salary matrix has 21 levels, from 8,756 to 165,758 meticais, instead of 103 steps, as was previously the case.
