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Government to vet 260,000 teachers over papers
Held. Some of the suspected documents being investigated. COURTESY PHOTOS
What you need to know:
- However, there is worry that most teachers have surrendered their information to internet cafes to register for them online because they are computer illiterate. This, Mr Muinda said, was noticed through the email addresses which some teachers submitted into the system.
The government has ordered an online registration of all teachers across the country to streamline their services and help weed out ghost workers.
The move follows reports of ghost teachers on government payroll and undue delays involved in registering the teachers.
Sources in the Ministry of Education and Sports, who requested not to be named in order to speak freely, said their registry department has already confiscated more than 80 academic documents of individuals who had come to register as teachers but had presented fake academic documents.
“The problem is huge. Teachers come here with documents from primary to university which are not genuine. Some even attach letters claiming they are from police to justify their documents. Some have been handed over to the police,” the source said.
“But we don’t know what happens thereafter. We have teachers who are in the service but joined fraudulently. We have a district education officer who retired in 2017 but had fake papers. He came here to process his pension and we verified his documents were fake,” the source added.
The Education ministry’s spokesperson, Mr Patrick Muinda, confirmed that every teacher irrespective of which education institution they work in, private or government-aided, must register online to enable government audit how many teachers they have and their area of expertise.
In addition, he said as a ministry, they have received reports on ghost teachers and are optimistic that the new registration will get rid of those who could have joined the profession with bogus credentials.
“Prior to the Teacher Management Information System, we would get many teachers without genuine academic documents. We always go back to the respective institutions to verify and this is tedious. There are chances that some can skip the system and enter into service,” Mr Muinda said.
Majority of the confiscated documents that Sunday Monitor has seen, which teachers presented for registration and were allegedly issued by the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb) included pass slips and certificates for both Primary, Ordinary and Advanced levels of education.
Mr Filbert Baguma, the Uganda National Teachers Union general secretary, yesterday blamed the ghost teachers on corrupt government officials who put them on the payroll.
“The purported qualified teachers who are on payroll are entered by corrupt government officials and possibly that is the reason they can’t display the payroll.”
“The head teachers don’t have access to the payroll and yet they are accountable for all the money that goes to their institutions. This has bred ghost teachers on the payroll,” Mr Baguma said.
He said 140,000 teachers subscribe to his union and almost between 1,000 and 2,000 teachers are deleted from the payroll every month without any justification. But Dr Jane Egau, the commissioner of Teacher Education, could not put a figure on the current number of teachers that are registered countrywide but said the mass registration will be used to link it to Public Service for salaries, especially those on the government payroll.
Mr Muinda said 789 teachers have already been approved online and issued with a new registration certificate that will subsequently be used for processing their pension when they eventually retire. Another more than 400 has been rejected for various reasons, including those whose documents could not be verified.
Also, the system has been designed in such a way that teachers who scored a 9 (failure) grade in O-Level Mathematics won’t be registered. Mr Muinda said the numbers will eventually improve after an awareness campaign that is hoped to start in March.
The teachers are expected to upload their academic documents from primary to their highest level of education, national identity card and their previous identity cards for the schools they attended on the ministry website. Once the documents are approved, a new certificate is issued with a code as a teacher’s new reference.
However, there is worry that most teachers have surrendered their information to internet cafes to register for them online because they are computer illiterate. This, Mr Muinda said, was noticed through the email addresses which some teachers submitted into the system.
“Many teachers don’t have email addresses. They have used email addresses for internet cafes where they filled the online registration from. It means when we send them feedback, they will not get it and this is dangerous because they run a risk of these people claiming their money in future,” Mr Muinda said.
Mr Patrick Kaboyo, Federation of Non-State Education Institutions (Fenei) national secretary, an umbrella organisation for all private schools in the country, yesterday said the innovation is good for getting rid of the ghost teachers that have for a long time affected the delivery of quality education in both private and government-aided institutions. Mr Kaboyo said more than 200,000 teachers work in private education institutions.
Numbers: The 2016 Annual School Census places the total number of teachers in both government-aided and private primary schools at 202,617 and those in secondary schools 58,100, bringing the total number of teachers in the country to 260,717.
Ms Egau says this distribution of teachers in both government and private schools could be slightly less than the actual number of teachers in the country. She says the numbers captured by ministry only shows those who responded to the census, yet there are other teachers who never registered, but are trained, and those trained, registered, but were not in the Education system at the time of the school census.
