Ministry applying double standards to recoup mistaken payment

What staff members at Lerala Junior Secondary School thought was manna from heaven has actually turned out to be delinquent loans that they now have to pay off.

When in March 2010, the Directorate of Public Service Management put out a circular inviting civil servants in certain areas to apply for the Remote Area Service Allowance, employees at the school (which include teaching and non-teaching staff) didn’t immediately apply but did so two years later. Following this, their bank accounts were credited with hefty five-figure back payment between December 2012 and Jan 2013. One beneficiary is said to have received P40 000 in back pay.
Lerala had been included on the list of areas that qualified for RASA but it turned out later that DPSM was referring not to Lerala where the school is but to a veterinary station some 10 kilometres away.

The Ministry of Education and Skills Development immediately scrambled into action, with one of its officers calling the deputy head of the school on a Sunday to notify him that the money had been paid by mistake and had to be reimbursed.

Then deputy permanent secretary, Frasier Tlhoiwe, followed up with a letter to confirm that information as well as to indicate that deductions would be effected the following month.

The deductions did indeed start in March but in the most unusual way. For a year now, one half of the beneficiaries group has been repaying the toxic debt while the other is not. This is despite the fact that either party got the money under similar circumstances.

A source says that this apparent preferential treatment has caused a huge rift between staff with those who are repaying feeling hard done by. The aggrieved party has written to the ministry headquarters to complain not just about this situation but the decision to stop it. In it they say that the recovery plan is neither fair nor reasonable because it disregards amounts involved. The letter cites the case of the teacher who received P40 000 but now has to repay the money in two years with no regard to the net monthly salary that this teacher gets.

Apparently, in 2010, DPSM directed the ministries of agriculture and home affairs to pay RASA to its officers stationed in Lerala. “We need clarity why we can’t benefit from the same considering the fact that we are from the same place,” the Lerala staff members say in their letter.