A survey has found that diplomats at 51 out of 71 missions are overpaid – so they’re taking heavy salary cuts, writes Mungo Soggot
THE Department of Foreign Affairs has slashed the salaries of South African diplomats – some by as much as 50% – after exploring what it really costs them to live abroad.
The cuts, said deputy director general of administration Jan Botha this week, could save the department between R20-million and R30-million a year. Diplomats are paid in the currency of the countries to which they are posted.
With the help of London-based consultancy Equal Employment Conditions Abroad (ECA), the department surveyed 71 South African missions and found diplomats in 51 of them to be overpaid. “It was astonishing to see how people were both underpaid and overpaid,” Botha said.
Many of the instances of overpayment occurred in countries which had undergone major economic restructuring, often associated with the transition to a market economy. Botha said that, for example, diplomats in former Eastern Bloc countries like Poland had been paid according to the cost of living in neighbouring Western countries like Austria and Germany, as it had been impossible to gauge accurately the cost of living there. Those salary rates had remained for the past few years, meaning many diplomats had been receiving salaries out of line with the new cost of living.
In similar instances, diplomats had received high salaries in countries suffering from hyper inflation, but their paymaster had not caught up with the radical economic reform programmes which had successfully slain rampant inflation. So South African diplomats in Brazil, which has undergone such an anti-inflation programme, received a 33% cut in salary last month.
Botha noted that many diplomats in the Far East had also been overpaid.
Botha said many instances of underpayment occurred in countries in Africa, where diplomats had been struggling to perform their duties.
He said ECA had sent cost of living questionnaires to the missions and had also referred to its own data gleaned from its other clients before recommending the cuts. The Public Service Commission (PSC)had approved the cuts as an interim measure while a consultant – Louis Kluever, former director general of the PSC – investigated a thorough rationalisation of the department’s expenditure.
Botha said that among the diplomats hit with severe cuts there had been “some flack at first … but at the end of the day they accepted it.”
One embassy official at the South African mission in Brazilia, the capital of Brazil, confirmed this. He said the cuts had been inevitable considering the new government’s demands, adding that they would force embassies to be more prudent.
“We now have to ask ourselves when considering a trip: `Will this really help promote South Africa’s interests?'”