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State employees will soon be able to retire early with no penalties – but conditions apply, writes Maya Fisher-French
In his budget speech on February 20, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni announced an early retirement scheme for public servants, where members of the Government Employees’ Pension Fund (GEPF) could take early retirement without penalties.
According to the public service early retirement framework, the offer for early retirement will begin on April 1 and will stand until September 30.
At that time, treasury will assess whether there are sufficient resources to continue with the offer for the remaining two years of the medium-term expenditure framework.
The process to apply for early retirement is open to all public servants between the ages of 55 and 59.
Employees in the police, correctional services, defence and intelligence sectors will qualify in terms of their own legislation.
However, each application will be considered on its merits and it does not automatically mean you will qualify.
Firstly, it is limited to 30 000 applications, which will be filtered based on skills, efficiency and personal circumstances.
According to the document, “skills are a priority requirement and therefore the skill set will be considered and these employees will not be allowed to leave yet”.
Read: Early retirement for 30 000 government employees
This could affect members with critical skills, including medical doctors, nurses, maths and science teachers, engineers, and other professionals categorised under “occupation specific dispensation”.
Efficiencies in each sector will be considered – in other words, the department will need to ensure they can “deliver services uninterrupted if they allow the employee to exit according to the post provisioning norms”.
The framework document makes it clear that this is not a retrenchment process, but forms part of the public administration reform initiative “to bring about efficiency gains without job losses and to bring on board unemployed young people who need to enter the job market, while balancing the needs of older employees who have been asking to be allowed to leave without any penalties to their monthly pension”.
The early retirement scheme will cost government approximately R16 billion, but will save about R20.3 billion in the wage bill over the three years within which the medium-term expenditure framework will take place.
