.
Finance Minister Charilaos Stavrakis is like the circus juggler who is putting on his best-ever performance before the whole show closes down – he is desperately trying to lessen the burden on the public purse in order to keep the economy afloat amid the global financial crisis and a slowdown in tourism.
The IMF warned the government for the umpteenth time to cut down its public spending by reducing the civil service payroll. Stavrakis hinted at freezing the wage increase of the 50,000 government employees (in a non-election year) who fired back with all guns and threatened to lynch the Minister, forcing him to concede to yet another wage increase until 2010 (a pre-election year). Worse still, this administration declared it would hire 1100 more civil servants, at a time when a better reorganization of the government machine would have done the trick… for less!
Next on the list was to minimise expenditure on major development projects. The well-connected construction sector (and the trade unions) came down on him like a tonne of bricks and Stavrakis called for public-use work to go ahead on school repairs, roads and within communities, resulting in a lot of rush jobs, traffic chaos and pollution and lots of new potholes.
Ironically, work has halted on building marinas and mega leisure projects, which should bring in the real money in the longer term, simply because some state officials are dragging their feet on deciding who to award these lavish contracts to.
Then, the well-meaning Finance Minister suggested that the ambitious and ego-driven Centre for the Arts, whose budget has been swelling even before its foundations were laid, should be postponed to beyond 2012 when Cyprus hosts the EU presidency. The Centre’s chairman swiped back indirectly using a different hat, this time as chairman of the national carrier, telling Stavrakis to first get rid of the spun-off Eurocypria which some regard as a direct threat to Cyprus Airways’ laid back domination.
Fortunately, the Minister has stood his ground, and despite some noise from the Flying Moufflon’s pilots’ union, pledged to keep Eurocypria in the air. After all, it is the only leverage the government has on keeping a competitive watch on the national carrier.
Finally, in what must be déjà vu, Stavrakis has dug up a memo he sent out last year about limiting expenses by civil servants which no one paid any attention to. Now, after 12 months of being stashed away in a drawer somewhere, this plan has been revived and was discussed “extensively” during an inter-ministerial meeting last week.
Cutting expenses means reducing non-productive work that does not affect development projects, such as overtime, overseas travel, travel bursary and hiring foreign experts.
Let’s hope that Stavrakis will not succumb to pressure (again) from the civil servants’ union Pasidy that will call for more hiring to clear the mounds of work that civil servants won’t be able to cope with simply because their lucrative overtime payoffs will have disappeared.
