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EAC retirees give fresh ultimatum
2005-11-16 07:49:49
By Joyce Mkinga
Former East African Community (EAC) workers yesterday gave the government two days to pay some 15,000 retirees who have not yet received their terminal benefits.
The workers resolved during a well-attended meeting at Dar es Salaam’s Mnazi Mmoja grounds to march to State House to present their case to President Mkapa if the ultimatum would not be met.
They said the majority of Ex-East Africa Community Workers Association (EACWA) members, who filed a suit against the government at the High Court in 2003, had not been paid their dues.
There are some few whose names have been published, but who have not been paid while most of them have not even seen their names in the newspapers.
The former EAC workers charged that the payment system was a ’mess’ because there were people who had been paid more than once while others had not received even a single cent.
’If the government will not publish our names in two days, we are going to see the president…we are tired of waiting,’one of them said.
They also alleged that some Ministry of Finance employees were colluding with bank workers to defraud the retirees, most of who are old and illiterate.
EACWA Chairman Alfred Kinyondo said the government had violated the agreement it had reached with the association that the workers’ claims be pegged to the US dollar.
He said the government was instead basing its computations on the Tanzania shilling, adding that this had resulted in ’gross underpayment’.
Kinyondo said there were some pensioners who had worked with the EAC for over 20 years, but most of them were being paid a flat rate of 2m/-, which, he added, was very little.
He said the government had also agreed to pay the pensioners by cheque, but it was instead paying many of the former workers in cash.
Kinyondo further said there were no payment vouchers and the claimants were just being given a small piece of paper to sign, a procedure that raised a lot of questions.
In cases where the pensioners demanded and were given payment vouchers, they found a lot of discrepancies in the figures, he said.
’They use those small papers to defraud the pensioners…the real figures are on the payment vouchers. Those pieces of paper the retirees are given to sign indicate just a fraction of what they are supposed to get.’
The EACWA chairman said the government had refused to cooperate with the association for reasons that had yet to be divulged.
Some workers said they feared that the payments would stop once next month’s general election was over.
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