Rabat, Morocco (TMT)- Moroccan activists have called on all Moroccans to join their protest, scheduled to take place next Sunday at 1pm in front of the Moroccan parliament, aimed at pressuring the government more to cancel the current retirement pension system of Moroccan ministers and parliamentarians.
On their Facebook page, the organizers of the event said that the pensions the parliamentarians and ministers receive are “too much exaggerated and illegitimate as a parliamentarian or a minister’s work is not a job, but a limited-time-voluntary-task.”
“This exhausts the state budget, especially that Morocco experiences currently huge economic and social challenges,” the activists said on their Facebook page.
Few months ago, Moroccan paper Aujourd’hui Le Maroc estimated that the total amount the Moroccan government allocates yearly to the pension system, of former ministers only, to stand at 24 million dirhams per year.
The whole controversy regarding parliamentarians and ministers pensions was triggered by a “stupid” statement by Charafat Afilal, the Moroccan Minister Delegate in Charge of Water to the Minister of Energy, when saying live on TV that “the pensions represent a very trivial amount of money (Jouj Franks in Moroccan Darija),” even though the amount is not trivial at all for mainstream Moroccans. In fact, the minimum amount of money received by a parliamentarian stands currently at 5,000 MAD per month, a sum way above the average salary in Morocco, estimated around MAD 2500.
The Moroccan Times.
