‘1,000 teachers off payroll per month’

Teachers accuse the Public Service and Finance ministries of the mess on their payrolls.

When auditors went to Kabale District in May to clean up the teachers’ payroll, Mr Emmanuel Nize’Imana, the district education officer, facilitated the movements of the officials.

For all its good intentions, the exercise never achieved what it set out to achieve; it introduced more ghosts than they were.
Nize’Imana never survived as well. He is one of the officials that have since been deleted off the payroll following the audit report. He has not received his salary since July.

“I was also deleted. Where teachers were sick, we provided our input but they never respected it. When they later sent us a list of names saying they were ghosts, it didn’t belong to Kabale,” Mr Nize’Imana said.

He points a finger at the Public Service and Finance ministries, saying: “The ghosts are created either by finance or public service to the extent that when we send real teachers to be put on the payroll, they are not put and those recommended to be deleted are not.”

According to Mr Nize’Imana, the June audit report was supposed to clean the payroll system but to their surprise, some names which were confirmed to be genuine during that exercise have since been deleted.

In October alone, there were 250 new deletes in the district.
“We don’t know the cause. These teachers are in schools. We don’t get returns from Public Service. We don’t know whether people have been reinstated or not. Teachers have been disgruntled. You can’t get good results from such kind of people,” he told this newspaper.

No communication
In a separate interview, Mr James Tweheyo, the Uganda National Teachers Union general secretary, said every month, close to 1,000 teachers are deleted from the payroll supposedly as ghosts without communication to the teachers.

He explained that in the month of July and August alone, more than 10,000 teachers were deleted from the payroll as living ghost teachers. “The payroll management is ruinous. Unatu has noted with concern the manner in which Public Service is handling our communication and complaints,” Mr Tweheyo noted.

But Mr Francis Agula, the principal education officer, told Education that while some genuine teachers are deleted off the payroll, these are just technical errors committed by Public Service and Finance.

However, he added that there are other teachers who were found to have illegally accessed the payroll using fake certificates to get appointed and posted to schools with the help of district personnel.

In reality, these should have been prosecuted, but according to Mr Agula, in a sarcastic tone said “Commissioner General of Prisons, Johnson Byabashaija is complaining that the prison cells are congested”.

Mr Jonas Tumwine, the Public service spokesperson, yesterday said: “Everybody is involved in the blame game. I am tired of these ghosts. They should stop haunting me.”
Education Minister Jessica Alupo, early this month confirmed that about 48,072 (25,919 for primary and 22,153 secondary) teachers did not receive their October salaries due to wrong account information, adding that it has since been rectified and that they would receive their pay this month.

But Mr Tweheyo insists to date, that the affected teachers including others who were appointed in March have not been paid despite claims from the respective ministries.

pahimbisibwe@ug.nationmedia.com