The ManicaPost
Samuel Kadungure
Senior Reporter
THE Public Service Commission (PSC) has finished the job evaluation of all ministries in a move that will overhaul job descriptions in sync with the National Development Strategy.
The move will push the ministries to achieve set goals and targets.
This was revealed by PSC secretary, Dr Tsitsi Choruma, in an interview with Post Business on the sidelines of the Public Service Secretaries’ Day celebrations held in Nyanga on Tuesday.
The secretarial profession has been identified as key to the day-to-day running of all ministries, departments and agencies, given the role executive assistants and secretaries play in managing administrative work and execution of managerial decisions, hence the need to celebrate them.
“About two months ago, the PSC finished a job evaluation for all the ministries. This will inform how jobs will be graded. We are talking about jobs, not people; because jobs define the kind of people needed in Government.
“We are looking at where those jobs fall in terms of the structures, whether they are positioned in the right places and doing the things they are expected to do. The evaluation revised the job descriptions in view of the mandates that different ministries have,” said Dr Choruma.
She said the last job evaluation was carried out decades ago when there was a different national development strategy and different mandates for the ministries.
“As you can see, post-elections, mandates continue to change and we also need to continue to update how we structure our jobs in order to implement the various programmes.
“The job evaluation exercise is all about defining and grading our jobs in Government, it is not linked to the issue of bonuses. That is delinked from this exercise.
“However, as we develop our remuneration frameworks, we are cognisant of the scope of work, the depth of decision risk that the person takes in order for us to be able to come up with the requisite remuneration framework.
“We are moving away from bonuses to performance awards. The bonus is a 13th cheque, while a performance award is a payment directly related to an evaluation of your performance. There is a formula to calculate what one will be paid.
“Those who perform below 50 percent won’t be paid, and we did that last year, and people now know there are consequences for not performing.
“This year we are moving forward with the performance remuneration for all senior officers and we hope people now understand. PSC will be collecting all the performance reviews by December and the results will be announced and payments will be done in February 2024,” she said.
Dr Choruma said the performance appraisal system will cascade to junior staff so that their bonuses are commensurate with productivity.
“Junior staffers will only earn bonuses commensurate with the performance of their ministries. The appraisals start from the ministers and the and junior officers cannot perform higher than their whole ministry,” she said.
Dr Choruma said the Public Service Pension Fund has grown to become one of the best managed funds, with vast interests in energy, real estate, equity, commercial banks, tourism and hospitality.
She said the fund received US$82 million seed money from Government in 2019, and four years down the line, it has grown to be ranked among the best managed funds in the country.
Dr Choruma said currently, their liabilities towards paying pensioners as they retire have gone down — taking about six weeks to pay the lump sum.
“I think we have greatly improved on that. The second thing is how we want to grow the pension fund itself because its growth has everything to do with our ability to pay.
“The fund has been capacitated through resources injected by Government. We are into the fourth year of this pension fund, and we have invested in a number of areas — real estate, shopping malls, tourism, hotels and we are seized with building the first airport hotel in the country. We have also built housing for students and industrial spaces for people to operate their businesses from across the country,” she said.
Dr Choruma said they have toured Government assets abroad, including Europe, to look at how they can be effectively managed to unlock value out of them.
“Our role is to support development and grow the fund to a point where our members, at some point, start to retire in dignity. How big the fund is — is a function of the value of assets that we hold today. The fund is growing daily because the economy is not stagnant. We have grown to become one of the biggest ones.
“We have 10 years to grow it before we start implementing the defined benefits. Currently we are still doing the pay-as-you-go. We hope it will bring more value to the pensioners. What we have done beyond that is creating a unit which speaks to retirement planning, which is one thing that is missing,” said Dr Choruma.
