–Tweah Rebuts Min. Ngafuan’s Pronouncement
The former Minister of Finance and Development, Samuel D. Tweah, has rebutted the statement made by the Boakai administration’s Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan, regarding putting an end to government employees earning below the minimum wage, US$150, as prescribed by the Decent Work Act, by January 2025.
On Tuesday, November 19, 2024, at the Ministry of Information’s regular press briefing, Finance Minister Ngafuan disclosed that as of January 2025 no government employee will earn below US$150.
According to Minister Ngafuan, the government has allocated funds to ensure that beginning January 2025 no government employee who earns monthly gross salary below the US$150 minimum, as provided for in the Decent Work Act of 2015, receives less than US$150 as monthly gross salary.
He vowed that all government employees will be paid on or before the 24th of the month, noting that the changes will take immediate effect this month.
However, Tweah has argued that news of “no government worker making below US$150” is a policy implemented by the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) administration since 2022. He pointed out that there were only a few workers making below the amount of $150.00, due to suspension or other factors. “So UP government’s announcement will only affect these few workers,” he stated.
Tweah observed that the CDC government pushed the more than 15,000 workers who were making below the US$150 minimum wage threshold above this level more than two years ago, noting that it had an annual cost of around US$6 million.
Also, he said, the CDC placed US$5 million in the original 2024 budget to increase the salaries of health workers to implement a new paygrade developed with health workers in 2023. “This money was taken out by the UP government, so news about finding money to implement this is no news,” Tweah stated.
“More importantly, when we say ‘harmonization can never be reversed’ we don’t mean you cannot carry salary up. The CDC government over the last six years took the salary of judges, teachers, UL professors and several other categories of workers to higher levels based on revenue performance. Of course, government salary would, and should, have to keep going up to catch up with rises in the cost of living overtime, especially since the whole body of Liberian salary has been low for the majority of workers since 2005. So ‘you can never reverse harmonization’ means you cannot go back to the broken UP era’s ‘basic salary and general allowance system’.
“In this dual system, some 43,000 government workers earned basic salary, mainly denominated in Liberian dollars, while more than 25,000 workers were under a general allowance US dollar system, where UP era minsters followed no rules, standards, or pay-grade in hiring people. We referred to this as ‘you call the salary you want, you get it’,” Tweah insinuated.
According to Tweah, it was these two systems that were harmonized, hence, the word harmonization. He added that under harmonization, basic salary was added to general allowance salary to give only one harmonized pay, which was subject to tax, social security and exchange rate dynamics. He averred that some workers took these social security and exchange rate effects as “salary cuts”, noting that they had to explain this over and over that they were never cuts.
He disclosed that in that process 7,000 workers in 5 ministries (MFDP, MFA, CSA, MOGCSP) who earned very high salaries as compared to all workers in other ministries were brought down to comparable levels. Some 15,000 workers who earned very low salaries across government, as low as US$45, were given salary increases.
“So, UP please let’s not distort the meaning of harmonization because you can never reverse it and go back to that discretionary general allowance system the CDC abolished,” he maintained.
He boasted that the current government is undertaking no significant wage reform other than building on what was already started by the CDC.
