UPND Government is Working & Cannot Fail to Pay Teachers
BY JOHN NYAMBE KALUNGA
There are some misguided opposition elements spreading rumours over the government’s handling of some newly recruited teachers. These are the people who don’t know that you rush, you crush.
When government is now working in an organized and methodical manner, they are not happy because they want shortcuts and chipante-pante way of doing things.
In just 4 years from 2017 to 2021, 10 million Kwacha was found in diverted salaries into their personal accounts and other accounts belonging to individuals who are not in public service. 9,800 ghost workers were found with over 700 million Kwacha paid to these ghost workers.
There are those who benefitted from the confusion created by PF who want to paint a false hope of dununa reverse coming back and they spreading fake news against government for their own selfish reasons and not for the good of the country.
The UPND government is working and already it has employed more teachers and other civil servants in one year than the PF ever did in ten years.
There is a process, which some teachers are failing to follow and to understand the correct way of doing things. The new recruit has to be introduced on the payroll system; they must be verified, vetted and approved.
Their bank accounts must also be verified that they are valid and active to be able to be registered as the salary pay point. Mind you, 30,000 teachers who were recruited is not a small number.
Currently, the Ministry of Education payroll also needs to be cleaned up and audit queries have to be resolved because no one is going forward with the same disastrous situation in the teaching service.
This came to light barely two months ago, when the Auditor General published the report on the audit of the government payroll for the financial years ended 31st December 2017 to 2021.
Have you taken time to read this report? Its findings were a damning indication of the mess in the payroll management of government ministries.
The mess in the teaching service was particularly scandalous. Irregular recruitments were the order of the day, such that the UPND government is now working day and night to bring sanity in the teaching service payrolls.
From 2017 to 2021, the Ministry of Education overshot its budget for salaries by over 3 billion Kwacha. There are also thousands of schools, which were operating without being gazetted, and without having establishment registers.
In 2021 alone, over 300 teachers were introduced on the payroll by the PF government as teachers without authority from the Teaching Service Commission and were paid salaries.
Furthermore, when the Teaching Service Commission undertook a verification exercise, over 500 teachers were found with fake school certificates.
Shockingly, the Ministry delayed taking action on 243 officers found in possession of fake certificates, resulting in the officers who were not even working, being paid salaries amounting to 26 million Kwacha by 2021. Payments were being made to officers with forged certificates.
Over 13 thousand officers in 108 districts were on the payroll but not on the staff returns, and they were paid over 800 million Kwacha.
In 60 selected districts, almost 2 thousand teachers were not accounted for in that the Ministry did not know the officers and neither was it aware of the whereabouts of the officers but they were paid salaries totaling over 100 million Kwacha by the PF government.
Under PF, irregular recruitments and diversion of salaries Was the order of the day. Imagine in Eastern Province in 2017, someone at Payroll Management and Establishment Control Department introduced 290 teachers on the payroll in Eastern Province and attached seven (7) bank accounts with a minimum of forty-one (41) employees sharing one account. By the time this was being discovered and corrected, government had already lost six hundred thousand Kwacha and has since failed to recover the funds.
This brings us back to the issue of the recruits; these recruits should understand that there are still people in the government system who are attempting to continue the old behavior of redirecting funds to person’s accounts, gain interest then send it back in the system.
Supervising authorities need to be on top of the game. The other possibility is that recruitment process was hijacked at the end of the process and infused in names that were not approved and government is now busy trying to normalise the payroll of new recruits.
So those who are trying to take advantage of some desperate recruits are wasting their time. The same government, which recruited the teachers, is now paying them. The days of the Zambian people being used by selfish politicians are behind us, and no amount of anti-government propaganda can erase the successful and strong foundation, which the UPND is laying for our country to achieve the Vision 2030.