THERE are two annual events of note in December each year.
One is Christmas Day. The other is the annual turmoil over teachers leave fares.
This nonsense has been going on for more years than we care to recall. By now everybody is entitled to ask why.
We recognise that Papua New Guinea has a large and scattered population of teachers and that they cover all levels of education from elementary to national high schools.
But we also recognise that this is a regular requirement of the national and provincial education authorities.
We are fed up with the annual litany of excuses trotted out to justify the failure to pay teachers’ leave entitlements.
This year’s excuse was that the teachers did not put in their personal profiles and vacation claims in time.
Then we have the predictable buck passing between the national Education Department and the provincial authorities; the mere fact that NCD entitlements were released in the capital while other provinces were responsible for paying out the allowances through provincial education offices, provides no logical reason for the delay.
Then there are the regional horror stories.
Whatever is going on in Mt Hagen?
Our locally based journalist reports that 300 teachers are still waiting for their leave pay just two weeks before school resumes.
There can be little point in parents complaining about teachers who lack commitment under such circumstances; the miracle is that teachers generally put up with this kind of unacceptable treatment.
Apparently K1.8 million was sent to Mt Hagen to meet teachers’ holiday entitlements, but only K800,000 was disbursed.
No satisfactory answers have come from the assistant education secretary at the provincial education office; he simply noted that the money allocated was exhausted and the claimants would have to wait for another K1 million to come from Port Moresby.
Why was the money allocated “exhausted”? An allegedly missing K1 million is no small matter. Was this simply a huge miscalculation by Western Highlands education officials? Or has there been some smart and slippery misappropriation going on?
If miscalculation is the answer, then one can only marvel at the sheer incompetence of officials who can only apply for leave entitlements for half of the teachers employed in the province.
If on the other hand the matter is criminal, it must be investigated by the fraud squad without further delay.
We’ve targeted Mt Hagen because it is a striking example of mismanagement, whatever the outcome.
But there have been complaints in the majority of provinces; this is a familiar story.
If it is so difficult to calculate how many teachers are entitled to leave funds, then it must be equally impossible to determine how many teachers are actually on the books.
And if that’s the case, that’s a poor comment on the administrative arm of both the national Education Department and its provincial counterparts.
At the same time as we carried the report from Mt Hagen, we published a statement from a senior Education official in the capital saying that “there would be no more frustrations as education officials were now working around the clock to process leave fares and entitlements” for eligible teachers.
Fine. But this is the second week in January.
Yet a significant number of them, it appears, have yet to take their Christmas holidays.
It seems to us that the whole system of allocating leave entitlements needs to be re-thought.
Overhauling the existing system – and that has been promised again and again – is clearly beyond Education Department officials.
The answer then must be to devise a completely new way of dealing with this situation.
This is mirrored by the repeated claims each year that ordinary fortnight salaries are often not paid for months on end, leaving teachers to devise arrangements with local trade stores.
That issue should also be attended to as part of a general overhaul of the payment of salaries and entitlements for our teachers.
In the meantime, every effort must be made to get entitlements to teachers who have yet to receive them and grant them leave to compensate for the period they have been kept waiting.