IT is amazing how trade unionists are holding government to ransom over pay increases at a time when the majority of the people go to bed on empty stomachs.

They are just too comfortable because they have a regular income when many Basotho would be grateful to have a meal at least once a day.

Civil servants, police, teachers and the rest of them are counting their losses based on previous financial years without a five percent increase when their neighbours and relatives would be happy to have enough coins to buy a loaf of bread.

They are doing a pretty good job singling out members of parliament as greedy with their M5 000 pocket money, when in fact they are cut from the same cloth.

The spirit of unionists is the same spirit of legislators except that there is an overlap, and the specifics of the similarities would be interesting. The ideology undergirding both state employees and parliamentarians is that of power, as it invariably will be.

Their intention is to seize the state machinery, attain its control and loot when the major problem facing this country is a bloated wage bill. Civil servants, through their unions, are basically contradicting their own principles - asking for more money where there is none.    

It may take us a while to get our heads around their claim that there is money because MPs are taking it for themselves and the utterance can only add to anarchy and yet both parties have no shame playing a tug of war with taxpayers ‘money.

It is not clear if politics as played by government workers is any different as practised by politicians, more like loose themes and perceptions. The main game here is appealing to the emotions of the people through the media and public fora, however that sounds, to a point where we all dance to their music, no matter how disgusting and repulsive it may all be.