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The whole fuss over how to reduce the state deficit has resulted in a soft pillow-fight as no one in government has the guts to give some heavy blows where it is necessary.
For the past few days and even weeks, President Christofias has been trying to appease the concerns of the civil servants by promising not to cut their wages or freeze pay hikes. On the contrary, he made a seemingly bold but in fact unimpressive gesture to cut the salaries of all cabinet members and his chief officers at the President Palace by 10%. He also appealed to the House President to follow in the same direction, probably suggesting that MPs take a 10% cut too.
With the annual saving a mere 150,000 euros, a similar move by MPs would not save much more.
On the other hand, in a decree sent through the Ministry of Education, Christofias has urged all public schools to reduce their spending by 10% which has raised major concerns doubting the president’s commitment to education.
Once again, all public teachers will get their pay rises as usual, which suggests that the 10% cut on a school’s budget equates to more than 30% of operational costs, as the payroll (that remains intact) accounts for 65-70% of a school’s budget.
These are half measures that have not been worked out properly and are probably subject to blackmailing from the civil servants union Pasydy that indirectly represents half the island’s workforce.
Finance Minister Charilaos Stavrakis won all the public and media praise when as soon as he was sworn into office, he pledged to reduce public spending by introducing savings and cutting down on waste. Is that another popular policy that has been shelved?
Then, the minister said he would freeze all new hirings in the public sector, but only after he had already approved the recruitment of some 1080 new personnel.
Then again, the president has said that he wants to introduce better management of the government’s human resources, by allocating more people to departments that are in need of manpower, such as the Land Survey’s Dept., solely responsibly for the mess and backlog that has been created with the issue of property title deeds. But Christofias has not been all to clear if he will reallocate staff from other departments.
The present administration is sending out all the wrong signals, on the one hand by refusing to upset the highly-paid civil servants and on the other by ignoring the other half of the labour force, the ones in the private sector that have little say and are usually the first ones to go in any corporate restructuring or redundancies.
And by asking public school children to sacrifice their teaching tools and necessary school repairs just because some civil servants will never give up their precious high salaries shows how serious this administration is about Cyprus ever becoming a centre of excellence for knowledge and education.
