Rabat, Morocco (TMT)- Morocco’s head of the government, Abdellilah Benkirane, said while giving a speech in front of members of the youth section of Morocco’s Justice and Development party yesterday, that King Mohammed VI gave him his okey to start reforming Morocco’s ministers and parliamentarians retirement pension system.
The expected reform came as a result of a “social media upraising” in Morocco that started few months ago, one aimed to cancel what they described as “exaggerated and illegitimate pensions of parliamentarians and ministers.”
To achieve this end, one petition saw Moroccans rally more than 50000 signatures and send it 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, a move the Moroccan monarch has accepted after giving the green light to Morocco’s head of the government to kick off the reform process.
Few months ago, Moroccan daily Aujourd’hui Le Maroc estimated the total amount the Moroccan government spends on the pension system, of former ministers only, to stand now 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.
