Officially, the request for the increase of the emoluments of the members date of September 2019. It is within the framework of the finance law 2020 that they have heard their claims and win your case. Today, it is the revelation in the public discussion of this request, which goes poorly with citizens and civil society organizations so that the country will experience by 2020 a contraction of GDP of at least $ 50 billion because of the pandemic of the sars coronavirus. To this we must add the quasi-absence of revenue in the coffers of the State. In a letter addressed by the Prime minister Sylvestre Ilunga Ilunkamba to the minister of the Budget, it is written black on white that the national elected officials wish to increase their fees to $ 2,000. They justify this amount by the fact that several institutions of the Republic have also experienced increases in recent months, including the presidency.
For fifteen days, this announcement caused much ink to flow. The issue of the gender pay gap is not new in the DRC, but, this time, the context is different, since several months, the train of life of the institutions, on the rise also because of the coalition’s new between the former president, Joseph Kabila, and his successor Félix Tshisekedi, is in the viewfinder. It should be noted that the functioning of the political institutions affect him only, the wages of the policies included, more than 50 % of the national budget.
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necessary Adjustment, to the president of the national Assembly
And mps are not the worst off. They even have the reputation of being among the higher paid civil servants and the treaties of the country for several decades. Public opinion has learned the new full pandemic when, in a correspondence dated may 21, 2020, and addressed to the head of the government and became viral, the president of the national Assembly, Jeanine Mabunda, request that the salary of each deputy national rated 4 600 dollars, be increased by the sum of 2000 dollars, and that the operating budget of the administration of this room is increased by 50 %.
Outcry
For the actors of the civil society, the pill is bitter. They have not hesitated to apply this approach unfair and unworthy in the light of the extreme poverty in which people live, of the Congolese people. Christophe Kadiata, a lawyer and member of civil society, the national Assembly is composed of an “aggregate of non-performing unnecessarily paid by the Treasury and which require the increase of their emoluments,” he wrote.
But the reaction the stronger is the coming of the side of the university of Kinshasa, the public university and the oldest in the country. Its teachers have denounced the fact that, unfortunately, there are in the DRC, a category that has ” everything to gain and another that has everything to lose.” They require in the same time as be published the salaries of all the layers-professional public service, namely president of the Republic, the Parliament, the government, the courts, and that, the secretary-general to the bailiffs.
The president of the congolese Association for access to justice and defender of the rights of man, Georges Kapiamba, has lent its support to this approach, believing that it is ” unacceptable that members of some institutions will be organized to confiscate all the national income to their own profit and as well as that of members of their families while the majority of Congolese live in poverty “.
according To Sindika Dokolo, coordinator of the citizen movement Standing Congolese, ” the request for an increase of $ 2 000 of the deputies in full social crisis shows that the DRC needs to regenerate its political class “, has tweeted this businessman and son-in-law of the former angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos.
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in the Face of this news, which continues to arouse the indignation of Congolese across the country, some observers believe that the parliamentarians are actors of social life that are among the most requested, especially in their electoral districts : “it is One thing to criticize our parliamentarians, one forgets just that they play a crucial role of solidarity through their respective bases. In some parts of the country, these elected officials support the education of poor children, to fund community projects and build bridges and other structures of great need, ” acknowledges Leo Ntokabi, also an actor of the civil society for Kikwit, a city located to the west of Kinshasa.
Celestine Musao, rapporteur of the national Assembly, is to hold back on this topic in a forum by taking witness from the speech of president Félix Tshisekedi on the state of the nation in December 2019. In fact, he had not hesitated to call a parliamentary of” social actor, widely requested “. According to the spokesperson of the national Assembly, each Congolese, serving the Republic, regardless of his position or his function, merit is indeed a decent compensation, referring to the country’s Constitution : “Who can believe that the top civil servant is badly paid honour to the good governance of which we speak more ?” he said, acknowledging that the congolese State is called to improve the working conditions of all public workers, including parliamentarians, teachers, or doctors.
The train of life of the State in the viewfinder
other parliamentarians have, however, criticised this approach of the office of the lower House. This is the case of the mp Delly Sesanga, and close to the opponent Moses Katumbi, who is campaigning in favor of reducing the standard of living of the public institutions. It must be remembered that this elected member of Luiza in the centre of the DRC is one of the few to have waived its fees during the period of the coronavirus to the benefit of the fund of solidarity of the response. He is also the initiator of the recent legislative proposal to abolish the structures that have become obsolete and expensive to the taxpayer in particular, as the national Council for monitoring of the agreement of 31 December, said agreement to the new year’s eve (CNSA), led by the former opponent Joseph Olenghankoy and for which the budget estimated to be 1 billion congolese francs was executed at 207 %, according to a report in the month of June by the congolese Observatory of public expenditure.
The glimmer of hope raised by the advent of Felix Tshisekedi as head of the country are diminishing more and more. The presidency of the Republic is more than ever at the heart of the serious revelations of corruption, embezzlement of public funds. The recent report of the Directorate-general of budget policies of the ministry of the Budget has revealed that the salaries of the staff of the presidency of the Republic (more than 150 advisors) have cost 37 million dollars to may 2020, an increase of 62 %. And the salaries of advisers to the president have more than doubled. Something to feed the anger of the Congolese, the majority of whom live on less than a dollar per day.
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