My contribution in this article is based on several philosophies one which originates from the sacred book of Christianity the Holy bible. The book stipulates in one its scriptures that “though shall not labour in vain.”
For all those who are hard workers in their working places could not be distinguished with their workmates who are non hard workers by using the same payroll at the end of the month. For good HR managers could add some incentives to those hard workers, and the non hard workers having realized their counterparts gained some incentive it would be a pinch on them but in deed a lesson learnt to increase efforts for delivering desired outputs of the employer.
The doctrine of “though shall not labour in vain” requires that all people who works should get in turn to what they have invested during their eight (8) hours in work. It would rather be a question to an incentive whether it should be issued with an indicator parallel to the quantifiable and quality deliverables outputs of the work done.
The increasingly trend of “business as usual” in NGOs and Government departments and ministries over the sitting allowances is a result of two great phenomena which requires a special attention to all the questions raised by Graff in his article. The two phenomena include income poverty of NGO workers, government officials and whosoever interested to the sitting allowance without exerting his abilities and potential to the outputs of the work done in the workshop. Many allowance seekers lives hard and poor life a factor which is known but not given attention by allowance givers. A person who does not have hunger for food, failure to pay her electricity bills, unclean water, discontent health services, failure to pay school fees for his kids, lives a poor house in one of the suburbs in Dar es Salaam can not be tempted to run for the sitting allowance. If you are lucky to trace the lives of all allowance seekers/receivers you will find out miserable untold stories of their really situation.
The second phenomenon is the habit of those whose monthly income does not bother their living standards. They live in good housing, clean water, take her kinds to study abroad, can afford a lavish spending in an excellent famous hospital in town which a lowly income earner can not afford and will end up dying in a queue at Mwananyamala hospital. These kinds of people have just developed a culture of demanding a sitting allowance. A good example of these people are those who when enter into their first sitting in parliament (2005) demands a debate for the increase of their salaries up to 12 million at which a poor teacher in Mbozi municipal districts only receive 120,000 take home.
As I can put my insights on some of Graff quotes such as “In order to create good participation “attendance allowances" were introduced with the aim of enticing officials’ local project staff and even beneficiaries to meetings and workshops”. I’m of an opinion that the intention was to create a good participation and the approach became to introduce the attendance allowance, which logically it’s a right approach but ended up yielding a different output and yet resulted to other problem. The earlier thinker of the problem and the approach to solve it contributed a lot to save the income poverty people without even thinking a combined approach that would necessitate the merging of two problems, the unforeseen problem (income poverty people) and the genuine problem of the project.
Let me wind up with few remarks, there is a great need of reviewing our “problem solving thinking” in our projects. The common approach of meetings and workshops which involves allowances has enormously increased the level of our poverty in terms of thoughts. We may be addressing problems which do not exist in many of our projects in NGOs and the Government as well. Take an example of these two issues here in the NGO sector and Government, “Tanzanian NGO workers in a popular sector (HIV, gender, microfinance, etc.) can easily double or triple their salary just by attending these meetings and” In the financial year 2008/2009 there was an allocation of a shocking 59% of the total payroll to benefits (nearly 380 million U.S. dollars) and a large part of this was spent on travel and daily allowances. These two examples demonstrate the really situation of income poverty among different categories of income earners in the country. Sarcastically the two quotes have been encrypted. If I would be asked to unearth the quotes I would come up with only one sentence, i.e majority of allowance seekers in workshops and seminars are simply income poverty people, something more than the funding of the projects should be done.
I submit
Frederick Fussi
Dar es Salaam
