Ghost teachers siphon millions from Govt

…As taxi drivers masquerade as teachers
…Govt launches payroll audit

By Marianne Nghidengwa and Patience Nyangove

SEVERAL Kunene taxi drivers are part of a well organised, illicit syndicate that has been fleecing Gov­ernment of millions of dollars monthly as ghost teachers are paid on average of N$15 000 monthly each in salaries, Con­fidente can reveal.
So desperate has the situation become that the Ministry of Education last month requested for assistance from the Minis­try of Finance to embark on a countrywide manual payroll audit and verification exercise at all public schools to establish the extent of the scam which has resulted in Government forking out around N$9.6 bil­lion for teachers’ salaries annu­ally.
In 2015, an assessment by the PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) revealed that the edu­cation ministry was paying full salaries to about 6 000 ghost teachers. After the re-grading exercise carried out by the public service, a teacher with a degree earns about N$17 000 a month – a rate which meant that Government could be los­ing more than N$100 million every month through ghost teachers’ salaries.
The Minister of Education, Arts and Culture, Katrina Hanse-Himarwa, Tuesday con­firmed the launching of a na­tionwide audit to unmask the ghost workers. “Yes there is an audit. Please call the PS.”
The ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Sanet Steenkamp, said the move was a strategic executive decision introduced in the country’s 14 education regional directorates to under­stand the magnitude of over expenditure in terms of salaries.
“We requested the respec­tive directorates to appoint a team of accountants, human re­source practitioners and school inspectors to carry out the audit exercise and determine what salary goes to who. We are do­ing a head count of teachers at all our schools who will be ex­pected to identify themselves with their identity documents and pays lips. Whoever is not counted will be removed from the system. We have even in­structed for those that are sick to report at certain points just to identify themselves because we need an in-depth understand­ing of the problem and how we can move forward. “For the ex­ercise we are using the October payroll to assess the extent of the problem of how as a minis­try we somehow overspend for salaries although we had a set budget. We also want to estab­lish how long the problem has been going on and for that we sought the help of the Ministry of Finance to help us with the internal payroll audit,” she said.
Minister of Finance, Calle Schlettwein, Tuesday revealed that 80 percent of the educa­tion ministry’s N$12, 7 billion 2016/2017 budget was now going towards teachers’ sala­ries alone. “We are now doing an exercise moving around schools to try and establish the discrepancies. We are going manually to the schools. Every employee must be accounted for, that’s why we are doing a payroll audit of who is there and who is not. Eighty percent of the Ministry of Education’s budget is now going towards salaries alone. It’s the largest ex­pense of Government and their payroll has shown discrepan­cies,” Schlettwein.
Confidente is reliably in­formed that the unearthing of the ghost teachers has prompt­ed the Kunene Education Di­rectorate to launch an inves­tigation into the matter after preliminary findings revealed that they were at least 20 ghost workers in its system. A large number of the ghost workers are said to be taxi drivers and ordinary people who work in cahoots with officials within the directorate and share the salaries once paid.
“It was a shock when the story surfaced. That taxi driver trying to get a loan opened a can of worms because it ex­posed how serious the matter is. It’s a delicate issue right now because all of a sudden every­one is distancing themselves and those that are investigating also don’t want to do so because senior people within the direc­torate are also implicated,” the sources said.
The sources added that the anomaly was recently detected when one of the ghost employ­ees tried to get a loan from of­fices of a parastatal (known to Confidente) in Otjiwarongo claiming he was an employee of the directorate. Upon verifica­tion, officials of the parastatal discovered that the employee was not employed at the di­rectorate. It turned out the employee was a taxi driver in Khorixas who like many other ghost employees are fraudu­lently gobbling Government funds. Confidente is also in­formed that the taxi drivers and other people who are illegally on the Government payroll are either relatives or friends of Government administra­tors who connived to defraud Government and share the pro­ceeds. The sources further said that officials of the directorate have been committing fraud and should equally be charged for the loss to Government.
The matter is said to be sensi­tive to an extent that those re­sponsible for the investigation are facing difficulties as some high-ups of the directorate are said to be involved.
In fact sources add that an HR official in Kunene (name know to Confidente) resigned from her position last year after it was detected she facilitated the process. Her husband at the time was said to be on Govern­ment payroll as a ghost princi­pal.
Contacted for comment, Ku­nene HR chief officer Kaino Itewa -who is said to be respon­sible for the investigation- de­nied looking into the matter but said that the directorate is busy conducting payroll veri­fications.
“I do not know what you are talking about, I was not in of­fice until today (Tuesday). I only hear that there is payroll verifications being done,” Ite­wa retorted.
Apart from Kunene, Con­fidente is also informed that Kavango East has a high num­ber of suspected ghost teach­ers. Steenkamp said that an education official in Kavango East has been defrauding the ministry adding that the audit will establish how many others have been doing so. Last year, Hanse-Himarwa said that the issue of ghost teachers posed a big challenge for the min­istry. She said ghost teachers would remain a problem for as long as there were unqualified teachers who have to re-apply each year for renewal of their appointments, creating loop­holes in the system.Perhaps the biggest case and its pros­ecution was in 2011, when the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) arrested eight Ministry of Education officials for their alleged part in a ghost teacher scam that cost Government hundreds of thousands of dol­lars in paid salaries. The eight suspects at the time made a night-time appearance before Magistrate Ruth Herunga in the Windhoek Magistrates Court. They were granted bail in amounts varying be­tween N$8 000 and N$40 000. Charges against seven people were however withdrawn af­ter the prosecutor general decided not to continue with the prosecution. The decision was reached after one of the accused admitted guilt to 16 charges of theft and two counts of fraud.