Tanzanian president revives annual salary increments after seven-year hiatus

The resumption of the annual salary rise for public service employees has been announced by President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania

Her statement comes seven years after the late John Magufuli abandoned the system of annual pay increases in 2016. Without making the raise known to the public, she assured the employees that good things are on the way, as seen in The Citizen Tanzania, a Tanzanian news publication.

President Hassan Samia asked business owners not to raise prices in their stores as a result of pay increases when he addressed the nation on International Workers' Day at Jamhuri Stadium in Morogoro. "We are resuming annual salary increments, which were initially frozen. We will restart this year and hope to do the same moving forward," she said.

“I thought this year we should return them to all employees, there are salary increases we are preparing, and we will continue as we had been doing in the past,” she added.

The proposed salary rise, which included raising the minimum wage for state employees by 23.3%, was approved by President Hassan on May 14, 2022. Salary payments for the fiscal year 2021/22 were Sh1.59 trillion.

The Tanzanian president had stressed that not everyone benefited from the government's 23.3% salary increase last year. The intention was to increase the minimum wage and a few other things, but the majority did not gain anything.

"Including myself, employee number one. But the other thing is that we increased the workers' allowances, and the beneficiaries of this are the workers with high salaries who did not benefit from the 23.3 percent salary increase. I know there are some institutions that could not pay when we gave the allowances, the budgets had already passed, so the harvest will come this year," the president said.