THE Grain Marketing Board (GMB) is looking for $12 million to pay 1 200 employees who were fired following the July 17 Supreme Court ruling on job terminations, an official has said.
Victoria Mtomba
Speaking at the company’s 4th annual general meeting on Friday, board chairman Charles Chikaura said GMB had earlier retrenched another 800 employees through its voluntary retrenchment exercise funded through Treasury.
“We are not able to finance the scaling down of our staff because the numbers are [too] big for us. We need assistance and a request has been made to Treasury. We are looking for $12 million for the 1 200 staff member’s arrears, in terms of salaries and benefits,” Chikaura said.
The job terminations had reduced the GMB staff costs to 32% of revenue down from 80%. GMB acting general manager Lawrence Jasi said after the retrenchments, the wage bill now stood at $680 000 down from $2,1 million.
Chikaura said the 1 200 workers that were fired were at all levels from deputy general managers to the lowest grade. They now remain with only 500 employees throughout the country.
“We think now we have got the numbers that we needed, that is 500 in the whole country and we think that sort of number makes sense to us,”Chikaura said.
He said since the parastatal would require more staff occasionally, it would employ seasonal and contract workers. Chikaura said GMB was going through a restructuring exercise so that it could separate the social from the commercial side of the business.
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He said the commercial side had been making profits and was viable, but there was need for fresh capital injection into the business.
GMB is one of the parastatals that are ear-marked for reforms and specialised audits. The specialised audit has begun and results are expected in three months’ time.
The annual report for 2013-2014 showed that GMB made a loss of $50 million from a profit of $910 032, attributed to low inventory and high operating costs.
GMB’s accounts for the period under review were not accurate due to challenges in data capturing as noted by the auditors.
The company’s finance and administration manager, Joe Muzurura said going forward, the company would not have accuracy challenges in its accounts as it had put in place relevant personnel at all depots.
He said the main challenge had been antiquated technology that GMB has been using.
