Manual Workers Union vows to fight Motsamai
Oarabile Mosikare | Wednesday May 27, 2015 17:04
- Battle lines drawn between Manual Workers Union and Motsamai
Yesterday the leaders of NALCGPWU called a press conference where it vowed to take the battle to the president of Botswana Public Employees Union (BOPEU), Andrew Motsamai. The NALCGPWU leaders stopped short of calling Motsamai a sellout that met President Ian Khama secretly during the monumental public sector strike in 2011 without the mandate of Botswana Federation of Public Sector Unions (BOFEPUSU) leadership.
Johnson Motshwarakgole, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the NALCPWU said that in the middle of strike, Motsamai went to see Khama and the leadership of BOFEPUSU was wroth with him [Motshwarakgole] when he protected the BOPEU leader.
“We are singling him out because he was not mandated by BOPEU,” said Motshwarakgole. He also revealed that when Motsamai was hired as BOFEPUSU secretary general fulltime, he never produced audited financial statements. This comes a few weeks after Motsamai told a press conference that BOFEPUSU had not audited its finances for several years.
“When we hired Motsamai at BOFEPUSU we paid him about P35, 000 monthly salary. We gave him the audited statement before he resumed his duties but he never produced financial statements or any minutes. He failed us.” Another speaker, Manual Workers Union treasurer, Neo Joel said they had ample evidence that the reason why Khama favoured other unions over others, was because of Motsamai.
“The battle lines have been drawn. We will take the battle to Motsamai and we will tackle him head on. We have been quiet and now enough is enough! We will expose Motsamai,” said Joel.
About the BURS issue, Motshwarakgole explained that the tax organisation had engaged a consultant and his union had members who were working with the consultant. He said they had collective labour agreement with 17 parastatals including BURS. The veteran unionist said they had proposed that BURS reorganize their salary structure. He claimed that despite BOPEU enjoying the limelight for negotiating 35 percent for University of Botswana (UB) employees, Manual Workers Union was the one, which negotiated the deal.
“We settled for the salary structures after bench marking from Commonwealth and other countries. That was when we settled for the 35% for our members. At BURS we went to benchmark from other countries like South Africa and Rwanda. We are