Prime
Over 100 Lands Ministry staff go two months without pay
Lands, Housing and Urban Development minister Judith Nabakooba. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Mr Dennis Obbo, the ministry spokesperson, said: “What I know is that these employees are supposed to be removed from the payroll because they did not get the Public Service appointment letters and what I was told is that the majority do not qualify to hold the positions.”
At least 110 staff from various departments in the Ministry of Lands and Urban Development have spent two months without receiving their salaries, this publication has learned.
The categories affected include; assistant Information Technology officers, dispatch clerks, customer support communication officers, some drivers, secretaries at Ministry Zon-al Offices, and officials from the Land Registry department.
The concerned staff who preferred not to be named told this publication yesterday that they have tried approaching their superiors to have their problem solved in vain.
“We have not received our July and August salaries; we are confused, not sure how we shall survive yet the ministry expects us to be delivering daily,” said one of the staff.
The ministry, when contacted yesterday, however, said the complaining staff are not part of their employees who got the Public Service appointment letters.
Mr Dennis Obbo, the ministry spokesperson, said: “What I know is that these employees are supposed to be removed from the payroll because they did not get the Public Service appointment letters and what I was told is that the majority do not qualify to hold the positions.”
However, the affected staff said they have the said appointment letters and blamed their bosses for not forwarding their names to be placed in the new Human Capital Management System (HCM) managed by the Ministry of Public Service (MoPS).
“We are permanent staff with the appointment letters, confirmation letters and even deployments,” they said.
To curb the issue of ghost workers, the MoPS last year migrated from the Integrated Personnel and Payroll System (IPPS) to HCM, which left out some staff. One of the affected staff said: “It has been a general problem among government ministries and agencies since the migration of civil servants from IPPS to HCM payroll, which dropped people who were not officially on public service structure.”
The staff added: “Other government agencies that were affected have gone ahead to sort issues of their employees except for the Lands ministry, which has failed to go and defend those posts and their employees to be temporarily put on HCM payroll as they wait for official restructuring of the public service structure.” Another one said, “People who have been getting salary are worried that they might lose their jobs if the IPPS payroll is switched off before they are put on HCM. People have lost their businesses, and landlords have chased them away because of the salary de-lays since HCM was introduced.”
This ministry was hit by the same challenge last year when a section of 108 staff accused their bosses of not paying them on time. When Daily Monitor wrote about the issue on November 2, the ministry officials pledged to solve it, which has not been the case almost a year later.
