South Africa’s ‘ghost teachers’ score millions in pay

Employees at the Mpumalanga Department of Education have fraudulently been paid over R6 million – despite the fact that they no longer work there, with some of them being deceased.

The Public Servants Association (PSA) expressed outrage over these fraudulent payments, uncovered in a recent Auditor-General report.

The report revealed that payments were made to no longer employed individuals, some of whom had passed away.

The Mpumalanga PSA’s Flip van der Walt told SABC News that this discovery is “very concerning”.

The timing of this is especially troubling, since the country is in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis.

Recent presentations on budget and projected spending for the 2024/25 financial year have shown that all provinces in the country are under significant pressure as provincial education budgets struggle with rising wage bills.

While teachers wages have increased, there are fewer funds available to hire additional teachers or maintain current staffing levels.

As a result, fewer new teachers are being employed, which is creating a worse environment for students.

This is particularly problematic in Mpumalanga, which only had a 77% matric pass rate in 2023, with only the Northern Cape performing worse (75.8%)

“In the Department of Education, the ratio between pupils and teachers is very low, and currently we are sitting with schools that are totally overcrowded,” van der Walt said.

“We are sitting with schools that are in a very very bad state, and this is all having impacts on the education in the province.”

With the way things are going at the moment, he added that there is little hope that the matric pass rate will improve this year.

“Overall, this is about service delivery to our children and the future of this country, so that is the concern that the PSA is having.”

While some have been chalking the wrongful payments up to human error, van der Walt explained that this cannot be the case.

If this were only an issue with a couple of employees, that may have been a good explanation.

However, for about R6.5 million to be paid out to employees who are deceased or who no longer work for these schools – it definitely “can’t be a human error”.

This is a clear indication of corruption going on in the Department of Education, he said.

The findings also imply that there has been a contravention of the Public Finance Management Act.

“It’s clearly a violation of this Act. There’s no control measures clearly, because how can you pay these salaries if there was a control in place?”

“This is having a huge impact on the education sector. The community is going to lose trust in the Department of Education, so investigations must go on.”

“Those that are on the wrong side of the law must answer to this and they must definitely be held accountable.”

Van der Walt said that the PSA will follow this matter up on a regular basis, however, he also pointed out that this issue has been going on for years at this point.

“We have also discovered that this was reported to the accounting officer in September 2022 already.”

“We are going to follow up on it for sure, and we will definitely never just let it go.”

Numerous people will need to be held accountable for this, he explained.

This includes the accounting officer who was in office during the time these payments were made, “and then obviously it will boil down to your HR officers and HR managers.”

He added that this isn’t just a mistake that the PSA can condemn, chalk up to human error and forget about.

“This is a big problem for us and I’m quite sure that as we go on with this some more information will also come out, and this might only be the tip of the iceberg at the end of the day.”

Read: One government employee has received a salary for 5 years while suspended