100 retired teachers still on government payroll

KAMPALA. A total of 104 Ministry of Education staff have continued to draw salaries from government coffers even after they clocked their retirement age.

The findings are contained in the ministry database being developing to capture the human resource. The officials are worried that the number could rise.

So far, Mr Herbert Kiguli, the ministry commissioner in charge of human resource, said they have entered 8,000 staff out of more than 54,000 employees.

For example, the system has already identified 146 teachers and non-teaching staff, who are expected to retire in the next six months. Of these, 104 individuals have already passed their retirement age but continue to serve and earn from the ministry’s budget.

“This system comes to fill the information gap. At the moment, you can’t readily tell how many employees we have. In the past, you would see two head teachers posted in the same school. Some people overstay on the payroll when they should have retired,” Mr Kiguli told Daily Monitor.

He added: “We are saying let’s have a system we can regularly update. You can just query it to have those officers who are going to retire in the next six months, which subjects they teach so that we plan. This system once it is complete it should help us to plan for pension so that people are paid in time and streamline deployment.”

The data captured, which Daily Monitor has also seen, shows that Mr Charles Ocan, a teacher at Akwanga was born in 1951 and should have retired seven years ago when he made 60 years; the lawful retirement age but continues to work at the station.

But Mr Kiguli insisted that the information they have is still a draft until they double check with the concerned to be sure that the data entered is correct.

Last year, Mr Alex Kakooza, the permanent secretary, directed all head teachers to furnish his office with details of the staff in their respective schools. According to Mr Kiguli, this is the information they are using to feed into their human resource management system.

This followed numerous requests from minister of Education Janet Museveni to know the number of teachers and schools they had without success.

Addressing a meeting organised by National Planning Authority (NPA) in March last year, Ms Museveni said she had been asking her technical staff since she joined the ministry to tell her the number of primary and secondary schools in the country but she had never received a response.

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