In a bid to appease teachers before the May elections, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government has promoted dead teachers.
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) Principal Secretary Justin Saidi has confirmed that some of the teachers promoted this month are dead or retired.
The ministry promoted 20,210 teachers earlier this month saying they will start receiving their new salaries from the month end of April.
It was later noted that some of the teachers are dead. But according to Saidi, the dead teachers were included by mistake and the ministry is currently correcting the error.
Saidi told the local media that the ministry used an electronic system to generate names of promoted resulting to errors.
“It is true that there are some names on the list for teachers who are dead.
“This is because we used the information from the Department of Human Resources Management which automatically depicted the names,” he said.
He added that his ministry is working with Teachers Union of Malawi [TUM] and other stakeholders to come up with a new list that may include teachers who were initially left out.
TUM general secretary Charles Kumchenga said the union has also noted that names of some teachers are appearing twice on the promotion list.
According to a statement released last week announcing the promotions, 15,491 primary school teachers in rankings of Grades K, J and H have been promoted. It added that 4719 secondary school teachers have also been promoted.
