By Jonah Man of God
The present cost of the wage bill is creating a serious problem for the government of Sierra Leone. Having to pay civil servants more than Le400 billion a month has left the government looking for creative ways to support this budgetary need.
The main way the government seems to address the issue at present is by raising taxes and creating new avenues for taxing the people more. Meanwhile many civil servants go months without receiving their salary, a situation that has no definite end in sight as the government grapples with poor or low revenue returns from its tax regimes.
A reliable source at one of the leading banks in the country has intimated FORUM NEWS that the government is in a horrible bind as it has hired way too many people that it cannot comfortably or reliably afford to pay, adding that when one visits government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), many workers are idle, making it difficult to qualify why they are employed and collecting pay from the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF).
As things continue to be difficult for the people of Sierra Leone, the government is finding it difficult to collect taxes from the people, putting many of its plans in a state of limbo.
The economist informed this medium that out of a population of approximately 7.5 million people, 2.5 million are under 18, 2 million above the retirement age, both of whom aren’t expected to pay employment tax, with the remaining 3 million not being enough to meet the government’s need to pay public workers.
Our source in the financial sector relayed that out of the 3 million government can tax, around 2 million are not formally employed, with the overwhelming majority involved in some kind of trade for a living. He added that leaves the government with about 1 million people it can reliably tax to raise funds for its many plans and actions not limited to meeting the needs of the wage bill.
The reason for all the taxes that government continues to impose on the people not limited to rising import and other duties can be attributed to the regime’s critical need to pay public workers. The government of Sierra Leone, our source informed, is not collecting enough from multinational companies operating in the country’s mining and other sectors. Therefore, there is serious need for the government to create new avenues for the citizenry to take an active part in donating more to the tax basket.
“At this present rate the government will not be able to meet the demands of its wage bill. The wage bill is more than overstretched. Government cannot realistically tell us the number of citizens who are formally employed. Therefore, taxes collected from employed people are not enough for government to pay civil servants. Taxes collected from business people when added to employment tax is also not enough to meet the government’s large wage bill that seems to be getting larger by the passing months. A lot of public money is being wasted on public workers who either don’t have anything to do at the office or collect pay without ever showing up for work. We also have issues with ghost employees, who as the term indicates, might be in the nether world, or dead. International support for our budget mainly from the European Union-EU is waning as these people also have their own problems to deal with. We have to be creative to either manufacture more, cut down on our dependency on food and fuel imports, subsidise critical commodities to make them easier to either import or buy, and create or promote new revenue streams for our youthful population.
“Where are our pharmaceutical companies? Where are our shipping, I.T. and chip making companies? Where are our engineering or chemical manufacturers? We should be, based on our arable land, able to be among the leaders in exporting agricultural produce. We love sports in Sierra Leone but what is being done to promote our sporting disciplines as seriously lucrative professional endeavours? There are a lot of ways to reverse our dependency on foreign aid to support our budget by investing in human capital development to create new tax revenue streams for the citizens that form the government of Sierra Leone,” the economist advised.
As a starting point a real auditing of government ministries, departments and agencies has been proposed for the government to know how many people are keeping their end of their terms of references for the jobs they collect monthly salary from the CRF. There is serious need for the government to know if we are not wasting public money on unworthy, under qualified or dead people.
A growing government needs a workforce complement equal to the task and demands of local and global expectations. However, a professional audit of who, if and under what circumstances are civil servants performing their duties and if this is the best they can do, is a serious existential need in government. Hiring people just for the sake of getting jobs and fulfilling an incumbent regime’s promises to its supporters will not help government to meet its demanding wage bill it is unable to meet. Continuing to raise taxes and duties on the people will always have the rippling effect of higher prices for goods and services by importers to offset rising costs, which always affect the most vulnerable who are denied access to critical goods and services.
The public financial leakage emanating from the government’s ballooning wage bill should and must be plugged as a matter of expediency.
