Guinea-Bissau: Anger after government suspends teachers salaries
Teachers in Guinea-Bissau are up in arms with the government for suspending the payment of their salaries.
The government has declared war on ghost civil servants on its payroll which it said has been bloated.
A government statement said most of the fraudulent claims are going to fictitious workers.
The country’s Council of Ministers this week instructed the education ministry to carry out a census of the number of its employees.
But the decision has drawn threats of action from the several teacher unions.
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Domingos de Carvalho, president of Bissau’s National Union of Teachers, said the union would appeal against the decision it called unfair.
“We are not planning any strike action, but we are thinking of finding other effective ways of reacting,” de Carvalho said.
The decision will affect some 8,000 teachers in the country’s primary and secondary schools who earn on average around 50,000 CFA francs ($86) per month.
The country depends largely on external aid to meet salaries in the education sector.
The International Monetary Fund, which reached a staff-level agreement for a $3.16m extended credit facility for Guinea Bissau in May, says the government missed three of its eight economic reforms targets that were due in March.
One of the missed targets was a ceiling on wages. The country has a population of 2.1 million people has a literacy rate of 56 percent.
Source: Africafeeds.com
