SABOI CAUTIONS UPND AGAINST CIVIL SERVICE ‘CLEANUP’

By GIDEON NYENDWA and JOHN KOMBE CALLS for a mass clean-up of the civil service on the pretext that most public employees are PF cadres who would sabotage the new administration are irrational and petty, National Democratic Congress (NDC) president Saboi Imboela has said. Ms Imboela said it was important for the UPND and everyone else to detach the public service from politics. She said UPND should learn to differentiate the public from the political appointments like the appointments of ministers, permanent secretaries and directors. Ms Imboela was reacting to the growing demands by the UPND supporters that the government should rid the civil service of PF-aligned employees. She said the UPND administration should allow the people who work in public offices without interference. Ms Imboela said if the UPND did not have support from some of the civil servants, they would not have won. “They don’t know who voted for them or not,” she said. Ms Imboela said the fact of the matter is that some of the civil servants were not happy with the previous administration. “Some workers in the public offices were not happy with their conditions of services and some wanted more money, it’s not all civil servants that are happy with the government of the day,” she said. Ms Imboela said some of the people who voted for the UPND are in the civil service and these are the same people they are trying to violate. And Lusaka Province Minister, Shael Mulyata, has assured that no civil servant will be victimised on political or tribal lines. Ms Mulyata noted that civil servants were a key in development and as such the culture of victimising civil servants because of tribe or suspicion of political inclinations had come to an end. She said this when she addressed heads of government departments in Chongwe yesterday in the company of Lusaka Province deputy permanent secretary, Pascalina Musokotwane. Ms Mulyata stressed that the duty of the government was to formulate policies that must be implemented by technocrats in the civil service. She therefore assured civil servant that no one would be victimised in the course of their duty and implored them to acquaint themselves with the UPND manifesto as it contained critical information on the aspirations of the new administration.