Beira Council Will Pay “13th Month”

Beira Council Will Pay “13th Month”

Maputo, 30 Dec (AIM) – Beira Municipal Council has declared that it will pay all its staff the end-of-year bonus known as “the 13th month”, even though the central government has declared that it does not have the funds to pay this bonus to all members of the public administration.

The bonus is equivalent to an extra month’s payment of the basic wage, hence the term “13th month”. There is no legal obligation on the government to pay its employees this bonus, but the payment has become a tradition.

Cited in Friday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Carta de Mocambique”, the mayor of Beira, Albano Carige, guaranteed that the city has the funds to pay the bonus this year to all its staff “so that they can provide municipal services with the greatest of tranquility”, and so that they will be “increasingly close to the citizens of Beira”.

Carige said that the money will enter the bank accounts of council staff members as from Friday. He did not say whether the “13th month” will also be paid to elected members of the Beira municipal assembly.

A similar promise was made last week by Maputo Municipal Council, and it is not yet clear how the other municipalities will deal with the issue.

The main reason given by the central government for not paying the “13th month” is the budgetary impact of implementing the new “Unified Wage Table” (TSU) for the public sector. Addressing the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on 20 December, President Filip Nyusi said “the financial effort associated with the TSU is gigantic”.

But not everyone in the public administration is being paid according to the TSU. Earlier this month, Maputo Council staff staged a brief strike protesting that the TSU is not yet in effect for municipal workers.

It remains far from clear whether the TSU will be extended to cover municipalities, and whether anybody on the TSU can also receive the 13th month.

Beira, the only municipality in the country run by the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), has been out of line with public sector wages before. In 2016, the then Minister of Economy and Finance, Adriano Maleiane (now Prime Minister), declared that there was only enough money to pay public servants 50 per cent of the 13th month (and those in leadership positions would not receive any bonus at all).

But Beira Council defied Maleiane, and paid the full bonus to all its staff.
(AIM)
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