Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) chair­man Ravin­dra Nan­ga, who was yes­ter­day award­ed se­nior coun­sel ti­tle, says the au­thor­i­ty is tak­ing steps to en­sure jobs are not af­fect­ed by its trans­for­ma­tion plan.

Af­ter ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200 WASA man­agers were re­trenched in 2022, with no word on whether or not more work­ers will be cut, em­ploy­ees at the util­i­ty com­pa­ny re­main ap­pre­hen­sive about their job se­cu­ri­ty.

How­ev­er, Nan­ga yes­ter­day said while changes are cur­rent­ly be­ing made at the top lev­el, it’s still pre­ma­ture to say whether non-man­age­r­i­al em­ploy­ees will have to find oth­er means of em­ploy­ment.
If work­ers are let go, he as­sured prop­er con­sul­ta­tion will take place pri­or.

Nan­ga said, “I am tak­ing it very slow­ly to en­sure that it is done prop­er­ly. It would be quite an em­bar­rass­ment for me as the chair­man should we get things wrong … I per­son­al­ly am very cau­tious. We have le­gal ad­vis­ers.

“With the trans­for­ma­tion on­go­ing, no firm de­ci­sion has been tak­en in terms of per­sons to be let go. We found a very dys­func­tion­al au­thor­i­ty and if we are able to turn that around, the first port of call will be the re­struc­tur­ing of man­age­ment. We found very weak man­age­ment there, so that if the new man­agers are able to mo­ti­vate the staff, there may not be need to let go staff or let go that many staff. So it’s a bit pre­ma­ture to be talk­ing about staff be­ing let go.”

He added, “As the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties (Mar­vin Gon­za­les) in­di­cat­ed, there may be some per­sons at the top lev­el but cer­tain­ly at the low­er lev­els, it’s pre­ma­ture.”

Nan­ga said WASA has since em­ployed eight new man­agers, all of whom will soon be on board.
These new hires in­clude in­ter­na­tion­al peo­ple with spe­cial­i­ty in the wa­ter sec­tor.
WASA is al­so in the process of hir­ing a ninth man­ag­er, he said.
Nan­ga said the next lev­el will in­clude hir­ing 20 more peo­ple.