Mass desertions in the army are creating anxiety in the country’s Joint Operations Command, which implored its Chairperson, President Robert Mugabe, late last year, to improve the living conditions of the defence forces.
Mugabe is the commander-in-chief of the defence forces. The Joint Operations Command, which manages issues of national security, comprises the army, prisons, intelligence and police.
General disgruntlement within both the army and the police has reached alarming levels, as indicated by the increasing numbers of soldiers and officers who have gone absent without leave in recent months. Posters of officers who have deserted are plastered on the walls at the army’s King George VI headquarters in Harare, and I Commando along the airport road.
”The general feeling within the army is that only senior army officers are being taken care of, from major upwards and nothing for junior officers whose salaries are way below the poverty datum line,” says an army officer within the army stationed in Bulawayo, the country’s second-largest city.
”Majors, colonels, lieutenant colonels and brigadier generals are pampered with [Toyota] Prados, residential stands in posh suburbs like Borrowdale, Chishawash Hills and farms, but none for junior ranking officers,” he said.
”The disgruntlement is so high. There is no adequate food, uniforms and the number of those being fired for expressing their feelings on the state of affairs, including politics, is going up,” he said.
The defence force has more than 40 000 employees, while the police force has an estimated 35 000.
Late last year, the parliamentary committee on defence and security recommended in a report that army personnel should be reduced, given the financial constraints the army faces.
In a report which is in the possession of the Mail & Guardian, the parliamentary committee noted that the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) had a total allocation of Zimbabwe $116-billion (R3,5-billion at the official rate and R163-million at the black market rate).
”The allocation excluding employment costs translates to 51,5% of the ZNA estimates submitted to the treasury and it falls far too short of the requirements for 2007 for the ZNA to perform its basic constitutional and statutory mandates,” the committee observed.
The committee further noted that salary increases in 2007 would remain inadequate: ”The ZNA was allocated a total of $116-billion against a bid of $320-billion. At current scales, the allocation can only support a pay increase of 350% which would see a general duty soldier remaining under the poverty datum line, which at the time is pegged at $175 000.”
The committee was also yet to confirm with the treasury ”if the allocation includes money for the leave days that were accrued by the defence forces during the four years they were in the Democratic Republic of Congo”.
”If it does,” the report said, ”salaries will be negatively impacted.”
The shadow secretary of defence and security for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Giles Mutsekwa, told the M&G the situation in the army was ”very serious indeed, a worrying development”.
”It is true that there are mass desertions from both defence forces and the police force. They are not happy with their conditions of service and remunerations as well.
”But what is disturbing is that these volunteers take various other jobs across the Limpopo. This includes being employed as security guards and in some instances as general workers in an industry,” Mutsekwa said.
”It is obviously so because the jobs they take in South Africa are paying more than what they get here in Zimbabwe,” he said.
”The issue here is that you train a person and you let that person get disgruntled to the point that he settles elsewhere. You could only be building a time bomb.”