Durban - The DA and another opposition party in eThekwini have decried the approval by the council for performance bonuses to be paid to city workers.
The move was approved during a vote at a council meeting last week. About 118 councillors approved the move, while 50 voted against it. Among the bigger parties, the ANC and EFF voted to approve the bonuses.
The council approved the payment of performance bonuses to workers on the lower end of the salary scale. An amount of R71 million has been set aside for this and the money will be drawn from the savings the municipality claimed had been achieved through cutting overtime pay.
During the discussion in the executive committee (Exco) on the matter, the city revealed that if they failed to pay these bonuses, it could trigger wild-cat strikes. It also said it had not paid bonuses in three years.
During the council discussion on the subject last week, councillor Thabani Mthethwa of the DA, which voted against the bonus, said it would be impossible for any councillor to justify why they approved a performance bonus when the residents were suffering due to poor service delivery.
He insisted that there was no basis for the bonuses.
“What we are saying is that we do not believe that we should be talking about performance bonuses as we believe there is not a single worker in eThekwini who deserves to get a bonus,” Mthethwa said.
He said if the decision (voting against paying the bonus) was not well received by the workers, they should blame their supervisors.
“We are here as councillors and public representatives. The decision we take is for the benefit of the community,” the DA leader said.
He also warned of a community backlash once the decision was made public. “Every cent should go to fixing our infrastructure which is struggling, so every cent should go there,” he said.
Democratic Liberal Congress leader Patrick Pillay, who also opposed the move, said the city should not reward officials for poor service delivery, adding that workers must equally accept responsibility together with the political leadership for the poor state of the city.
“It is clear that for the past many years, non-service delivery features prominently. Water shedding, raw sewage spillages, inconsistent grass cutting, unkempt open spaces, non-implementation of city’s by-laws in terms of illegal dumping, and the list goes on, are indicators of why bonuses cannot be justified,” he said.
Defending the approval of the bonuses, eThekwini mayor Mxolisi Kaunda said most of the city’s workers had delivered against impossible odds, especially after the April floods.
The mayor admitted that some workers were not performing their duties but warned against labelling all of them as lazy.
“Let’s not paint all the workers of the municipality as failing in their duties. There are workers like that ... there are workers that we must fire (for non-performance). As the ANC, we believe these (who will receive the bonuses) are low-level employees and among our lowest-paid workers,” Kaunda concluded.
THE MERCURY