Public Service grilled over ghost teachers

 

The Permanent Secretary said Abim had no ghost teachers because the district had no community or private schools.

Kampala

Public Service Permanent Secretary Jimmy Rwamafa and his team sat through a three-hour interview before the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into mismanagement of the Universal Primary and Secondary Education programme over creation and maintenance of ghosts on the payroll.

The commission, chaired by High Court Justice Ezekiel Muhanguzi was riled after it discovered 20 suspected ghost head teachers in Abim yet the district had only 34 schools. “Mismanagement of the payroll is one of those key facts that have led to wastage of resources, an example is in Abim district. So which schools do these excess 20 head teachers lead? Keeping absconders and the dead on the payroll has also wasted funds,” Justice Muhanguzi said.

Efforts by Mr Rwamafa, his commissioners and directors to convince the commission that the problem lay elsewhere fell on deaf ears as angry commissioners wondered what it takes to clean up payrolls even with a computerised system.

Public Service and the Ministry of Local Government came under the spotlight for their respective roles in the programmes. Local government faced questions regarding construction of school infrastructure and supervision which fall under local administrations, especially for primary schools.

Other areas of concern according to the probe team that is winding up its activities include multiple enlisting of teachers in different districts by Uganda Computer Services on the payroll, lack of professional engineers to supervise construction work and non-existent schools. Muhanguzi said poorly constructed structures account for at least Shs12bn of lost UPE funds.

Mr Rwamafa told the commission that efforts to recruit trained and qualified engineers had met resistance in some areas because conditions in those areas especially remote areas hence the failure to supervise the construction of standards structures. He said despite the failing to get qualified persons, sometimes to appoint caretakers to fill the gap for six months.

“We have not carried out manpower survey but through inspection we are able to establish the trends in those areas,”Mr Muhanguzi said. He added: “However, the head teachers are recruited by the district and what they should have done was to stay with the ceiling given to them by Ministry of Education and this situation goes back as far as 2005-2006.”

The PS insisted that whereas, there are indications that the problem of recruiting ghosts was detected back in 2005, nothing to arrest the trend had been implemented by the Public Service ministry because of how entrenched the problem is.