Rabat, Morocco (TMT)- While giving a speech in front of members of the youth section of Morocco’s Justice and Development party last week, Morocco’s head of the government, Abdellilah Benkirane said that “only 131 former [Moroccan] ministers receive a retirement pension.”
Benkirane stressed that the ongoing critics vis-à-vis the pension system is a faux debate, one that should not take much focus as “the PJD is here to fix major problems that Morocco suffers from and recover huge amounts of money that go in the wrong side as was the case with the last reforms of the compensation system.”
Benkirane’s statement came following a popular upraising on social media to cancel the pensions of parliamentarians and ministers, one which saw Moroccans rally more than 50000 signatures and send a petition to the highest authority in the Kingdom, King Mohammed VI, in a bet that the Moroccan monarch will favorably accept their signatures and cancel the pensions of parliamentarians and ministers.
In its yesterday’s edition, Moroccan daily Aujourd’hui Le Maroc estimated the total amount the Moroccan government spends on the pension system of former ministers to stand now at 24 million dirhams.
The whole controversy regarding parliamentarians and ministers pensions was triggered by a ridicule statement by Charafat Afilal, the Moroccan Minister Delegate in Charge of Water to the Minister of Energy, when saying that the pensions represent a very trivial amount of money (Jouj Franks in Moroccan Darija), even though it is not trivial at all for mainstream Moroccans as the very minimum amount received by a parliamentarian stands at 5,000 MAD per month, a sum way above the average salary in Morocco, estimated around MAD 2500.
The Moroccan Times.
