As Suriname prepares to implement a planned 15% salary adjustment for all civil servants at the end of September, a ruling party parliamentarian has issued an urgent warning that the policy will exacerbate long-standing, highly controversial pay inequities across the country’s three branches of government that have yet to be resolved.
Rossellie Cotino, a member of the National Assembly (DNA) representing the National Democratic Party (NDP), brought the pressing issue to the floor during a public plenary session of the legislature on September 1. She emphasized that public outcry over excessive overpay for senior officials in certain sectors—most notably the judiciary—has already been building for months, with some senior public servants currently earning as much as four times the annual salary of the country’s president.
Years ago, government launched a formal review process to correct the extreme pay skew between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. To date, however, no final regulatory framework to address the disparities has been drafted, debated, approved or enacted into law. That gap means the upcoming across-the-board civil service salary hike will automatically flow to senior legislative and judicial officials, whose pay scales are legally tied to the civil servant salary system. If the adjustment goes forward as planned, Cotino argues, the already problematic gap between the highest and lowest paid public officials will widen even further.
“It makes no logical sense to grant this across-the-board increase now, only to turn around and roll it back later once the pay reform is finalized,” Cotino told the assembly. As an immediate stopgap measure, she proposed that National Assembly President Jennifer Simons explore capping her own salary for a temporary period, which would halt automatic increases for all positions whose pay is linked to the presidential pay scale.
Cotino is calling on the administration to intervene urgently, pausing the planned salary adjustment for senior linked positions until a comprehensive solution to the existing pay disparities is reached. Her goal is to prevent a policy designed to improve the economic standing of rank-and-file civil servants from inadvertently further inflating the already controversial compensation of top public officeholders.