Changes come to Zimbabwe’s on co white civil service

Press, 17 November 1980, Page 20

Changes come to Zimbabwe’s on co white civil service

By

BRUCE JOHNS

in Salisbury

At his farewell party before emigrating to South Africa, the white civil servant spoke . loudly and angrily to friends about his replacement, a 25-year-old black woman. "It - took me 21 hard years to get where I got,” he fumed. “It took her a night in bed with the man at the top.” Whether that really was how the woman got her $30,000 a year job is not known. What is clear is that most of the 1000 white civil servants who have quit their posts since the black majority Government of Mr Robert Mugabe came to power eight months ago have left the country with little money and a lot of bitterness.

"There's no future for the white in this civil service,” said one of the, 11,800 whites still remaining in the 44,000-strong service. He, like hundreds of his colleagues, plans to leave when his children finish the school year. "We’re being overtaken by blacks in promotions, we’re often ignored by

our Ministers and we’re not allowed to handle work of a sensitive nature." Yet no white civil servants have been sacked. Some have in fact been pushed up the promotion ladder over bemused blacks, and most have adjusted to accepting yesterday’s servants as today’s masters. “A year ago I was out in the bush fighting these chaps,” a white employee of the Ministry of Information, Immigration and Tourism - confided, “Yet I. get . on like a house on fire with my new boss, and he was a terr (terrorist).” At the State-owned television station, white announcers who once read bulletins about “terrorist" leaders,” today speak of them, poker-faced, as “comrades.” In the officers’ mess at King George VI .barracks, headquarters of an army that is being reshaped. to include' rival combatants in the conflict, white colonels,- majors and captains stand rounds of drinks for the guerrilla commanders they- once hunted

down.- At the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, a white officer sacrifices his lunch hours to teach trainees how to handle his job. It wasn’t always like that. The Prime Minister, Mr Mugabe, was forced, a month after independence, to freeze all advancements and appointments when he learnt that the whites were feverishly promoting themselves through what one aide described as "a white Mafia protection society,” the white-dominated Public Service Commission. That has stopped. In a rare tribute to white civil servants recently, in the Upper House of Parliament, Senator John Shoniwa declared: "When one considers the masters they served yesterday, what went on yesterday and the prospects of African Government standing in front of them, I must say I salute them for having opted to serve with us." ■ '

Like most of the 200,000 whites still in Zimbabwee — at a time, when 1500 are

leaving every month — the civil servants peg their future here to the existing high standards of health care, education and law and order. "If the level of our life-style falls too low, we’ll go elsewhere,” a Commerce and Industry Ministry employee told me. "But that could be a long way off.” Like other whites, the civil servants get edgy when they read in their daily “Herald” of the banishment of the outspoken former joint military commander, Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, of threats to strip the . former Prime Minister, Mr lan Smith of his citizenship, and of the murder trial of a Cabinet Minister, Mr Edgar Tekere.

But little has really changed in the world of the civil service. Marxism, the war cry of many of Mr Mugabe’s guerrillas, has hardly ■made a mark. The new breed of black civil servant seems to covet his car, suburban house and garden, his dark suits and his dinner parties as much as his white counterpart. — Copyright, London Observer Service,