KwaZulu-Natal Education Department faces financial crisis due to ghost employees, mismanagement

PAYING ghost employees has contributed to the KwaZulu-Natal Education department's financial crisis.

- WILLEM PHUNGULA

This was revealed by the Basic Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube, who held an urgent meeting with the provincial government in Durban on Monday. The Minister held an urgent meeting with Premier Thamsanqa Ntuli, Education MEC Sipho Hlomuka as well as Finance MEC Francois Rogers in an attempt to avert a further crisis in the department.

Speaking to the media afterwards, Gwarube said the reason for the crisis was a historical underinvestment in education but the financial crisis was also compounded by paying ghost employees and for nonexistent pupils. She said despite previous manual head count exercises to root out the problem, it persisted because people managed to find new ways of cheating the system.

"Despite the under investment in education historically, we can sit and say there were no man-made problems. The department has not been prudent and there must be accountability for that. For instance the department has been paying ghost employees, failing to remove retired or dead employees from the system as well as for inflated pupil numbers in schools. We need to do an audit to clean out the system," said Gwarube.