Mehluli Sibanda Senior Sports Reporter
ZIMBABWE Cricket are close to completing a massive restructuring exercise mainly aimed at reducing the high wage bill understood to have gobbled at least $400 000 every month. The development will see some of the ZC members of staff, most of whom whose contracts expired at the end of last month taking salary cuts or not being offered any new deals which effectively means they will become part of the country’s unemployment statistics. 

ZC chief executive officer Wilfred Mukondiwa who has been given the task by the board to spearhead the restructuring explained that the move was meant to make ZC more efficiently run. 

“Employees in ZC are offered fixed term contracts which expire, most of them expired on 30 April that was the 2015-16 season. Before the expiry of these contracts they were given written notices for termination of fixed term contracts in terms of the Labour Act,’’ said Mukondiwa.

“They were informed that there was a restructuring process going on, ZC is operating with staff whose contracts have not yet expired. Players are not affected, the national contracts and high performance of some are still running. We want to streamline our operations so that we become a lean and more efficient organisation, it could mean that ZC was overstaffed, the exercise will show that, it is almost complete, it is not necessarily about numbers, whether there was any duplication of duties.’’ 

ZC chairman Tavengwa Mukuhlani said they had given Mukondiwa the go-ahead to come up with ways of reducing the costs of running the establishment. Mukuhlani said it was clear that ZC was overstaffed and action had to be taken which they did after waiting for contracts of the bulk of the office staff to expire at the end of April. Before they embarked on the cost cutting measures, ZC had 248 personnel on their payroll.

Disgruntled cricket fans have taken to social media to lambast the Mukuhlani led board with some even going o the extent of calling the ZC leadership as having no idea of what they were doing with claims that the entire technical team and ZC staff are yet to resume office since their contracts expired on 30 April. Mukuhlani defended the action they had taken which he says has not come at a cost since they had waited for the employment terms of the staff to come to an end as opposed to retrenchment. 

Mukondiwa as well as a few others whose contracts did not expire last month are at work which is said to have given ZC a realisation that they can actually do without most of those away. 

“In as much as our board has been criticised as being clueless, what has come to light is that ZC was overstaffed. The board has given the CEO the mandate to reduce the costs and numbers, Mukondiwa has been asked to carry out that exercise. 

“That process is almost finished, those coming back to work are taking salary cuts if their services are still being required while those not needed are not coming back. In as much as they can say Mukuhlani is clueless, no one is being retrenched, contracts have expired and the board has given direction on where we want to be,’’ said Mukuhlani. 

He described the reshuffling as an exercise that was going to shake up the whole of ZC with employees from the bottom up to the highest level being affected. 

“This restructuring is total leaving no stone unturned right from the CEO to the lowest employee. It is total restructuring, no one will be spared,’’ he said.

Most of the players on national as well as high performance deals have their contracts expiring at the end of July and it is likely they will be made to take salary cuts to further reduce the wage bill at ZC. 

As cost cutting measure, ZC last year did away with the franchise system they had adopted in 2009 and reverted back to the old way of running the game.