Browsing by Author "Msovella, Alfred Ernest"

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    Civil service reforms in Tanzania mainland: the challenges of redeploying the retrenchees.
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1996) Msovella, Alfred Ernest
    Restoration of macroeconomic stability and attempting to address account imbalances, has been an important objective of economic policy reform in Africa since the mid 1980s. This has resulted into donors' and policy-makers' emphasis on reducing the role, and boosting the efficiency of the state as a key reform component, inevitably focusing attention on the bloated and unproductive bureaucracy. The ovestaffing in the public sector, the alarming size of the wage bill, and the attendant strain that is placed on the governments limited budgetary resources, have been fully used as justification for reducing the number of workers employed by the state including those who work for public enterprises. The retrenchment of civil servants and parastatal workers, as well as the rationalization of public sector pay scales and employment policies, have become essential components of structural adjustment programmes (SAPS) in Sub-Saharan Africa. While there is a general agreement on the need for public sector reform. implementation of programmes designed to reduce employment have been hampered by concerns about their political and social costs. In terms of social costs, large layoffs have the potential of destabilising private sector labour markets specifically since such programmes often occur along side demand reducing stabilisation policies. But perhaps of primary attention has been the magnitude of labour market adjustment costs born by retrenched workers in finding alternative sources of employment. The perceived quest for compensatory programmes to mitigate the social costs of adjustment has in part emanated from concern over the plight of public sector workers. This Dissertation deals with Civil Service Reform (CSR) in Tanzania Mainland's central government and specifically is on the challenges of redeploying the retrenchees as a key component of the Civil Service Reform Project (CSRP). The project is under the umbrella of the Civil Service Department (CSD). It is contended by this study that the redeployment exercise is not all that plausible and seem to be a smokescreen geared at giving the retrenchees false hopes. It is more of a public relations affair! The study has gone through the entire wave of reforms in Africa and is of the view that administrative reform (including CSR) taking place in Tanzania is informed by reforms of a similar nature elsewhere as part and parcel of the unfolding pluralist democracy, (`good governance' being one of its most essential components}. A look has also been made on retrenchment since it is but a side of the CSR coin, the other being redeployment. In a nutshell, the study attempts to shed some light as to whether there is seriously anything like "retrenchment with a human face" within the CSRP.