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IOL News reports that payments to ghost employees has contributed to the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) education department's financial crisis.
This was revealed by the Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube, who held an urgent meeting in Durban on Monday with Premier Thamsanqa Ntuli, Education MEC Sipho Hlomuka and Finance MEC Francois Rogers in an attempt to avert a further crisis in the department. Speaking to the media afterwards, Gwarube said while the reason for the crisis was a historical underinvestment in education, the financial crisis was also compounded by payments to ghost employees and for non-existent pupils. She said despite previous manual head count exercises to root out the problem, it persisted because people managed to find new ways of cheating the system. “The department has not been prudent and there must be accountability for that. For instance the department has been paying ghost employees, failing to remove retired or dead employees from the system as well as for inflated pupil numbers in schools. We need to do an audit to clean out the system,” said Gwarube.
Although the meeting acknowledged that R3.4 billion was urgently needed, there was no commitment as to when and where the money would come from. Gwarube and Ntuli promised to negotiate with the National Treasury to bail out the department. It also emerged that the R3.4 billion would be a short term measure with Rodgers putting the overall figure at R7 billion in order to normalise the provincial government finances. He said that another reason for the financial mess was the national government’s mistake of approving an unfunded wage increase which had cost the provincial fiscus R80 billion.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Willem Phungula| at IOL News
- Read too, Teacher union Naptosa voices concern over KZN education department's financial crisis, at The Mercury
Get other news reports at the SA LabourNews home page