The Zambia United Local Authorities Workers Union (ZULAWU) has urged the Government to quickly introduce the local government service commission to enhance professionalism in councils.

ZULAWU vice-president Misheck Nyambose said in an interview in Lusaka yesterday that his union fully supported the idea and wanted the Government to urgently put up the commission to restore sanity to councils.

Mr Nyambose said it would be better for the commission, as an independent body, to look at issues of recruitment, transfer and retirement of council officers as a way of improving operations.

He said councils fail to perform because councillors do not engage workers on merit and that has killed professionalism.

"We support Government's position to bring back the local government service commission because councillors tend to abuse their powers to hire and fire," he said.

He said he did not understand why some people were against the commission when for years now there had been consultations among the Government and all stakeholders on the need to set up the commission.

He said ZULAWU wanted the Government to set up the commission by the end of this year to increase transparency and efficiency in councils because only a few of them had qualified staff.

He said if the commission handled the recruitment and transfer of council staff then it would be easy to move expertise from one local authority to another.

He said ZULAWU wants councillors to be there to guide operations while issues of recruitment, transfer and retirement of staff should be handled by an independent body.

The Local Government Association of Zambia (LGAZ) recently opposed the proposed reintroduction of the commission after having been part of the consultations since 2005.

LGAZ said there was need for elaborate consultations before reintroducing the commission.

The LGAZ's 52nd conference, in its resolutions, felt that bringing back the commission would compromise the accountability of officers to local authorities and weaken member councils' powers of supervising and holding officers accountable.

The association said after careful consideration of the issue, it concluded that the move would undermine the decentralisation policy.