Issue of bonuses vexatious

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Growing up, we knew that the end of November going into December was a rowdy period. This was because of the 13th cheque people got from their employers.
The drunkards would blow their monies in a matter of days and the wives would hit them on the head with a kango pot full of sadza or in some cases cooking oil. One neighbour of ours who was a soldier would smash up windows of his house around this time. But that is not the point of this article. The point of this article is the vexatious issue of bonuses.

I do not understand this concept of bonuses. From my understanding a bonus is a reward for a job well done and it is strange that every employee gets a bonus at the end of every year. For decades now, this has been going on and no minister has ever questioned why this is so. Why is the hardworking worker and the slacking, mediocre worker put in the same pot?

It is no secret that there is a lot of mediocrity amongst the civil servant ranks and this is because there are no set deliverables: It is a matter of get to work at 8am, break for lunch at 1pm and knock off at 4pm. I once had a serious quarrel with a government employee who refused to serve me during lunch time despite the fact that she was seated at her desk in front of her computer: For crying out loud, she was not going to lose anything by serving me. Honestly, isn’t there some sense of satisfaction in going that extra mile, going out of your way to achieve whatever goals your employer hired you for?

There has been a silly argument that civil servants do not do their work properly because they are poorly paid: What a load of rubbish! A principled someone, someone who knows their job well, will do the job to the best of their ability once they have agreed to do it, no matter how low the pay is. If the pay is not enough leave the job rather than compromise the quality of your work.

I was a teacher for a number of years and some of my colleagues; most of them actually if they are still in the profession do not deserve US$20 a month. It is unfortunate that this calibre of teacher who makes up the majority of the teaching staff, after failing to do his/her job properly during normal working hours will organise ‘extra’

lessons and parents are expected to pay extra for these fraudulent schemes that the authorities allow to go on. The duty of a teacher is to make pupils understand whatever is prescribed by the curricula. If the teacher feels the pupils need to learn some more during the April school holidays, it is the teacher’s duty to teach those pupils at no extra cost to the parents. Aren’t teachers paid for the months of April, August and December whilst they sit and do nothing but abuse school girls under the guise of ‘extra’ lessons.

It is simple really: Teacher X, when you took over this class, the pass rate was 40%, now it 20%, so no bonus for you and try harder next year. We can even go further and set pay grades according to result based performance.

At the moment, civil servants do their own performance appraisals.
This should change. In the case of teachers, the headmaster can quietly observe his/her staff over the course of the year. This is so easy because there are a number of teachers who do not attend lessons and if they do, they just go to the classroom to sit and nurse their hangovers or to nurse a broken heart or to deliver fake Chinese goods to fellow teachers: “you will pay at month end my friend”

So armed with the time table, the headmaster can do the rounds and check on slackers, he/she can interview the school pupils and they will tell him/her who is slacking; believe me, the pupils know a good teacher from a bad teacher. A quick round of the store rooms will reveal a teacher or two having sex with a school girl.

A lot of people might ask me why I am attacking the ordinary working man like this when there is rampant corruption in government, when we are governed by people we did not elect to power, when there are issues like 2008, Gukurahundi to talk about.

Well, the answer is simple; you should be accountable before you demand accountability. You should first remove the log in your eye...