Zambia’s Emoluments Commission Opens ZCAS Salary Harmonisation as Wage Bill Pressure Builds

By The Zambian Economist Analyst

Zambia’s Emoluments Commission opened a salary harmonisation and rationalisation exercise for the Zambia Centre for Accountancy Studies (ZCAS) on Thursday, applying to one professional training institution a method it wants to become the standard route to a public sector pay rise: a completed job evaluation first, a test of what the institution can actually afford second, and no increase without both.

Director General Mr Chembo F. Mbula told the launch that ZCAS, working with the Commission, had already carried out a job analysis and evaluation exercise covering its posts, producing a proposed salary structure meant to reflect “an appropriate hierarchy of jobs” rather than the informal scales that build up in an institution over time. Board members and staff from both organisations attended.

ZCAS Executive Director Dr Egret Lengwe Chanda welcomed the engagement and backed the Commission’s role in guiding remuneration reform. ZCAS relies on internally generated resources rather than a government subvention, he said, and has consistently paid employees’ salaries without a missed payment. He also put a figure on the workload: ZCAS lecturers teach more than 30 hours per week, above the norm at comparable institutions.

Participants included ZCAS management, union representatives and staff from the Commission’s Emoluments Unit, working towards a pay structure that recognises responsibilities, rewards performance and stays affordable for an institution that pays its own way.

Why the exercise exists at all

Mbula’s remarks placed ZCAS’s exercise inside an older problem. Public sector pay in Zambia has “historically been characterised by distortions, disparities and inconsistencies,” he said, despite repeated government reforms that produced “minimal or inconsistent” results. A succession of past commissions on salaries and conditions of service documented the same disparities across public institutions without resolving them.

His answer, put to ZCAS staff at the launch, borrowed a familiar line: “If you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Fixing pay distortions, he said, needed a different method, not another round of the same negotiations.

What the Commission checks before it says yes

That method now has legal backing. The Emoluments Commission traces its authority to the 2016 amendment of Zambia’s Constitution, which created the office, and to the Emoluments Commission Act No. 1 of 2022, passed under the UPND New Dawn government, which gave it operating powers. Its mandate covers pay policy, emoluments guidelines, job evaluation, research and monitoring compliance across public institutions.

In practice, that mandate becomes a short checklist an institution has to clear before any pay increase is approved:

• A completed job evaluation showing where a post sits in the institution’s hierarchy, not where informal precedent has placed it.
• Compliance with statutory obligations to NAPSA, NHIMA and the Zambia Revenue Authority. Mbula said institutions with outstanding obligations to any of the three “cannot reasonably expect approval of upward remuneration adjustments.”
• Current audited financial statements.
• Evidence that the new structure is affordable on an ongoing basis, not only in the year it is approved.

An institution that fails any of these does not reach the harmonised scale, whatever the job evaluation says its staff should be earning.

The economics behind the policy

Mbula grounded the exercise in equity theory, the idea that employees judge their pay by comparing it with what others doing comparable work receive. Where that comparison feels unfair, the effects show up in measures institutions already track: lower productivity, higher staff turnover, more absenteeism and poor time-keeping. A harmonised, evaluation-based scale is meant to close that comparison gap, rather than simply raise pay across the board.

A small exercise, a much bigger number

ZCAS is one institution. The pressure the Commission is trying to manage is national. The IMF’s most recent assessment of Zambia’s economy projects that the government’s primary fiscal surplus will fall to 1.1% of GDP in 2026, down from 3.1% in 2025. The Fund attributes the decline to weaker tax revenue, the suspension of fuel VAT and excise duties, pre-election spending, “a civil service wage adjustment,” and agricultural subsidy overruns it estimates at 1.3% of GDP.

Zambia’s 2026 national budget, presented by Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane, is set at K253.1 billion, equal to 27.4% of GDP. Personnel costs are routinely one of the largest recurrent items inside a budget of that size, which is why an unplanned, institution-by-institution pay adjustment can move the fiscal numbers about as much as a shock to copper revenue or the exchange rate.

The timing matters. Zambia completed the sixth review of its Extended Credit Facility arrangement with the IMF in January 2026, closing out a 38-month programme approved in August 2022 that disbursed roughly US$1.7 billion in total. A government coming off an IMF-supported programme is typically judged on whether it can hold onto the fiscal discipline the programme enforced, without the Fund’s own conditions to enforce it. A wage bill that moves case by case, negotiation by negotiation, is one of the more visible ways that discipline slips. A wage bill that only moves once a job evaluation and an affordability test both clear is, at least in principle, a more durable way to hold the line.

What is salary harmonisation and rationalisation?

In the Commission’s usage, harmonisation aligns pay for similar jobs across different public institutions, so that comparable roles are rewarded on a comparable basis. Rationalisation strips out allowances and pay elements that duplicate each other or no longer serve a clear purpose, folding them into a cleaner salary structure. Together they replace scattered, historically accumulated pay scales with one that can be defended on the basis of the job, not an institution’s negotiating history.

What does the Emoluments Commission do?

The Commission formulates and reviews pay policy, issues emoluments guidelines, coordinates job evaluation exercises and monitors institutions’ compliance with the salary structures it approves, in addition to running harmonisation and rationalisation exercises such as the one now under way at ZCAS.

Why this matters beyond ZCAS’s payroll

For businesses and investors, a credible, rules-based approach to public sector pay is one of the less visible inputs into Zambia’s fiscal credibility, the same credibility that shapes the kwacha, borrowing costs and how confidently multi-year investment decisions get made. ZCAS follows the Commission’s stakeholder engagement on Pension Laws 2026 on the Copperbelt earlier this year, another sign that the Commission intends to apply the same evaluation-then-affordability sequence broadly rather than negotiate exceptions case by case.

For ZCAS staff, the near-term test is simpler: whether a structure built on job evaluation delivers pay that finally matches what equity theory says they are already comparing themselves against.

Mbula closed the launch by asking participants to approach the exercise “with objectivity, professionalism and a commitment to the greater good,” before declaring it open. What ZCAS produces over the coming weeks, an affordable, evaluation-based salary structure or another partial fix, will be one data point in whether Zambia’s Emoluments Commission can do at scale what it is now testing at one institution.

Related coverage

• How the Emoluments Commission Supports Trade and Investment
• Beyond Salaries: How the Emoluments Commission Can Strengthen Zambia’s Economy
• Pension Laws 2026: Emoluments Commission Leads Copperbelt Engagement
• Emoluments Commission Congratulates President-Elect

Related reading: The Looming Fiscal Cliff: Rebuilding Zambia’s Political Retirement Architecture.

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