Andy Duffy
A teacher at a state school in the Northern Province has shot himself, apparently because he was caught netting four salaries a month for one job.
The Gazankulu teacher was trapped when he tried to collect the pay cheques during a sting operation the province set up last month to expose “ghost workers” among its 125 000 public servants.
The province temporarily halted payments into employees’ bank accounts and insisted staff personally collect salary cheques from paypoints across the province.
Provincial government officials have called in the police to question other employees, many of them teachers, who were caught trying to con the province with fraudulent pay claims.
A representative for Premier Ngoako Ramathlodi’s office says police discovered the teacher’s body when they went to his house to question him. “Most definitely he realised he had been caught and shot himself,” the representative adds.
It is not clear how long the teacher had been drawing a quadruple salary, nor the extent of such fraud plaguing the province.
The province was still sitting on dozens of unclaimed pay cheques earlier this week. Ramathlodi’s office, however, believes such fraud is costing the province around R100-million a year.
The provincial education department, which employs an estimated 67 500 staff, has uncovered cases where female teachers, taking advantage of changes to their marital status, have used two or three different surnames to secure double or triple pay.
Many teachers who left the state’s employ years ago were also found to be drawing salaries. Payments were also going to teachers who were dead.
The Gazankulu teacher, who has not been named, is the second reported suicide triggered by the province’s clean-up campaign.
A pensioner killed himself last month after the province temporarily halted his disability grant – one of 92 000 grants frozen while the province decided which were genuine cases.
The province’s bloated public service – inherited from four former homelands in 1994 – remains its most intractable problem.
Public-service salaries cost the province more than R810-million a month for the past year – 93% of its total budget. It wants to cut that spending to about R620-million a month – 65% of its total budget – for the new financial year.
Attempts to isolate ghost workers have been stymied so far, largely because the inherited workforce brought with them four different identity documents and payment systems.
Until last year, when education staff went on to a centralised, computerised pay system, salaries were paid from about 5 000 paypoints, most of them schools.
The province says it will revert to paying this month’s salaries directly into bank accounts for staff found to be in the clear.
The initiative to get staff to collect their salaries personally could be repeated after six months, however, to uncover other “ghosts”.