With 12 public holidays to date, Guinea is not far from the 13 standard days worldwide. However, looking at the 2014 trend for most countries, Guinea is above Mali (11 days) and tied with Tunisia (12 days). Furthermore, it is below Vietnam (13 days), Senegal (14 days), Ivory Coast (14 days), Indonesia (15 days), Nigeria (18 days), South Africa (18 days).
If rest is important for workers (increasingly small numbers in our country), public holidays also have a considerable impact on the progress of the country’s economic activity. Although no study has been carried out or yet made public on the subject, the situation should be a concern for the authorities, because in addition to public holidays, our dear Guinea is world champion in the production of ghost town days, walkouts, in short, strikes of all kinds.
An unofficial source from the Ministry of Economy and Finance would estimate monetary losses linked to a day not worked at nearly 3% of the production of resident economic agents, or 1% of GDP corresponding to more than one billion GNF per day. And that’s without counting the days before the holidays when everyone rushes to get home as early as possible, causing endless traffic jams. Added to this are the bridge days observed the day after the holidays, especially during the Ramadan or Tabaski period. It is not for nothing that in Guinea the day after Tabaski was declared a public holiday, non-working and paid throughout the national territory. In addition to all these cases, there are public holidays falling on a Sunday and which are postponed sine die to the following working day, that is to say Monday (case of 04/08/2024).
Furthermore, it should be noted that public holidays can have, in addition to negative effects, very positive effects on several sectors of activity, notably commerce, transport and telecommunications because, they are also synonymous with enormous household consumption expenditure. . Very unfortunately, apart from VAT, the State collects practically nothing from these expenses mainly due to the proliferation of the informal sector which also employs an enormous amount of labor (jobs not protected by social security and likely to lead to unemployment at any time).
Like any Guinean worker, I am very happy to rest during public holidays or to tackle other tasks different from those I carry out on a daily basis during my working days. However, if we want to build a solid economy, capable of meeting the needs of our populations, we have the heavy task of undertaking substantial reforms which will consist above all of creating employment for most Guineans, in order to reduce the unemployment rate that we experience today, which is difficult to assess, if not impossible, and bring it to its natural level (full employment of factors, particularly work).
This will necessarily involve calling into question certain non-essential public holidays, but also paid leave in other structures, particularly those in schools and universities, which spend more time on leave than all other formal sectors. We dare to hope that in the near future, measures will be taken to promote work for economic agents of working age and not through the culture of laziness. Because only work, the cardinal value of countries that have stood out in this world, can lead us to achieve our much-desired development goals.
By Safayiou Diallo
Economist
2024-04-11 12:54:10