Goretetse Kekgonegile, the publicity secretary for Botswana Federation of Public Service Unions (BOFEPUSU), was yesterday at pains to explain the fate of the workers who need salaries to pay for rent, food, children's needs, and other essentials. Expectations were that BOFEPUSU would have made arrangements to cater for the striking members, after government gave them notice in April that they would be implementing the no work no pay principle end of this month. However BOFEPUSU publicity secretary told Mmegi yesterday: "This is a struggle, it has repercussions. However we suspect some deductions were not done correctly as some workers had too much money deducted from their salaries... we are still compiling the list to see what went wrong". Kekgonegile also told Mmegi that the unions were taken by surprise by government's decision to implement the no work no pay principle, claiming that the unions were still in the middle of negotiations with the employer regarding the implementation of this principle. "We also expected them to write to us, and file casualty returns," Kekgonegile added.
Panic started among the affected workers last Friday, especially those whose payday falls on or around the 20th of every month. Some of them actually expressed the hope that the failure was only due to bureaucratic slowness now exacerbated by the strike. For the first time in their lives, the affected civil servants find themselves in a situation where they are unable to pay rentals, utility bills, honour their stop orders or buy groceries. For some, it may also mean a struggle to get to their meeting points where they have been camping for solidarity since the industrial action began. The salary and wage freeze being implemented by the Accountant General in the Ministry of Finance is in terms of the no work, no pay rule agreed by the government and the unions at the outset of the strike.
