Government dismisses 15,000 teachers

More than 15,000 teachers will have to look for jobs elsewhere after government rejected “questionable papers” they had submitted for registration under the Teacher Management Information System (TMIS).
Sunday Monitor has established that only 52,900 teachers have been registered under TMIS and issued with certificates.
Sources in the Ministry of Education told Sunday Monitor that majority of rejected teachers had forged documents. The mass registration of teachers across the country ended on December 31, 2019.
At the end of the registration deadline, 193,726 teachers had submitted their documents and they are pending approval. The government said those who had submitted their documents before the end of deadline are safe. At least for now.
Mr Alex Kakooza, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education, confirmed the numbers on Friday, and reiterated that a total of 262,332 teachers applied for the registration as of December 31 2019.
He confirmed that the academic documents of 15,706 teachers were “totally rejected” over various reason and that the registration of the teachers, who submitted their documents is still pending.
“The documents of teachers both secondary and primary teachers from government and private schools who submitted their documents before the deadline are still in the system yet to be approved,” Mr Kakooza said.
“Much as the deadline for mass registration ended, we are going to continue scrutinising their documents before we issue them with certificates,” he added.
The government is in the process of deleting affected teachers from the payroll. However, it is not yet clear whether teachers with questionable papers will be compelled to refund public funds.

Forgeries
The spokesperson of the Education ministry, Mr Patrick Muinda, clarified that some of the 15,706 teachers whose registration was rejected had forged documents while others did not upload all the required documents.
“After receiving the teachers’ documents, we went back to their respective institutions where they studied from to verify whether they really graduated from there.
“We established that the names of some teachers were not on the manual list of their institutions they claim to have graduated from and we sent them back and they have never come back,” Mr Muinda said.
He said that of the 262,332 teachers who submitted their documents to be registered, 259,000 (61,000 secondary teachers and 198,000 primary teacher) are teaching in the government schools.
This means that only 3,332 private teachers applied to be registered by the government.
The government on February 2019 ordered an online registration of all teachers across the country to streamline their services and help weed out ghost workers following reports of ghost teachers on government payroll and undue delays involved in registering and promoting teachers.

Integration
The Commissioner for teacher training and education, Dr Jane Egua, said: “We are going to integrate the list of teachers we have verified to the system of public service so that their salaries are processed. Those who are not on the TMIS system will not be paid because we do not know them.”
She also said the ministry has cancelled the old certificates that were being used by teachers since some of them were forged and fake.
The National Secretary Federation of Non-State Education Institutions (FENEI), Mr Patrick Kaboyo, complained that the ministry did not do enough sensitisation.
“You cannot expect to achieve 100 per cent of the results for the first time. I urge the Ministry of Education to extend the deadline and penalise those who will not be able to register.”

About TMIS system

TMIS system requires all teachers across the country to submit their bio data (names, place of residence, telephone numbers and email addresses, among others). The teachers were also asked to submit all their academic documents from Primary, secondary (Both O-Level and A-Level), certificates for those teachers who went to teaching colleges and transcripts and certificates for those who went to different universities.
The Ministry of Education then verifies the documents from Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) and the respective institutions one went to.