![]() A forensic audit by Ernst & Young, done in 2014 upon request from the Auditor General's office, showed that Uganda had been losing about US$ 5,4 million per year through ghost payments and other forms of graft. A similar audit in 2014 had already deleted 8,299 non-existent workers. In 2016, the country removed more than 5,500 ‘ghost’ workers from its civil service payroll. Theft of civil servants’ salaries from within the state is a long-standing problem in Uganda. There are also cases that go unreported (to the union) because teachers are heavily intimidated by the people who manage the system’. ‘We don’t have statistics but judging by the queues of teachers waiting at education department’s doors every month to raise their problems, the cases are many. How widespread the salary shortages problem is among the 185,000 on the Uganda’s state teachers’ payroll, Ugandan Teachers Union Unatu’s Secretary-General, Filbert Baguma, could not say. We also looked at documents, including pay slips, bank statements, email exchanges and payment schedules, and interviewed colleagues, friends and family members of the affected teachers to corroborate our findings. More than three-quarters of the two hundred, one hundred and seventy in total, confirmed that over the past five-year period, they, or colleagues they knew, had experienced salary shortages. Through the Ugandan teacher’s union, UNATU, and also by visiting some schools randomly, we collected names and contact details of two hundred teachers from all four regions of the country, who had recently approached the union because of a work-related problem. Though other civil servants – especially those at the bottom of the pay scale, like nurses – have been affected, for this investigation we focused on teachers. Of two hundred teachers from primary and secondary levels sampled for this investigation, one hundred and seventy reported having missed salaries several times, or had a colleague or colleagues to whom this happened. Fortunately, the child survived but the couple are still saddled with debt. During this time Emmanuel and his wife Rita almost lost their small daughter to meningitis ‘because we had no money for hospital bills’. ‘One day while at work, I just wrote my resignation’, he says. He has had to quit his job, since he could not afford to travel between home and school anymore. No money for hospitalĮastern Uganda-based English Literature teacher Emmanuel, who has asked for his surname to be withheld, was not paid for twenty-three months. ‘When salary comes one month’, he says, ‘it never comes the month after that.’ So far, the teacher has gone thirteen months this way, amassing ‘many debts from the community’ and ‘depending on a few people with kind hearts’. However, two years later his situation has not improved. When complaining to his district office he was handed a form to fill and a promise that all would be well the following month. ‘They told me it ‘hanged’ and went back to the ministry’, he says. But moments later the teacher of Murolem Primary School, in the same district, left the bank premises dejected. ![]() On the morning of October 30, 2019, Maxillary Owilli, 56, walked into the bank in the northern Uganda district of Abim, looking forward to his payday salary. ![]()
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