Commission steps in to assist unpaid health workers

Thousands of contract nurses still waiting for April remuneration

Eastern Cape Public Service Commission boss Lulu Sizani has reprimanded the provincial department of health over the unpaid salaries of contracted healthcare workers across the province.

This week the Dispatch reported that thousands of nurses contracted to fight Covid-19 had not been paid for April.

Initially, the department said it had run out of money to retain 8,000 healthcare professionals who were hired in March last year on a one-year contract, but following public outrage and protests, the department decided to rehire them on a three-month contract in April after it sourced R400m.

The department also renewed the contracts of community healthcare workers for 12 months, but most of them also went unpaid at the end of April.

Sizani said she had spoken to the department after learning from a Dispatch article that the healthcare workers had not been paid.

She said department officials told her that workers’ employment documents had never been captured onto the Persal system, hence they did not receive their salaries.

The Persal system generates salaries for every government employee.

Sizani said the most affected districts were Amathole and Sarah Baartman.

“The department says in those districts, the workers’ employment documents needed for the second contract were not captured on time.

“The Persal system then blocked the registration of those documents, because Persal has its own date for runs and if you miss a date the payment dates will not be the same,” Sizani said.

“In these two districts, the workers’ documents were not captured at all. The department is still trying to locate the employees to fill in the outstanding paperwork.”

Sizani said the department still needed to capture a “responsibility code” for each worker in each component — to avoid paying ‘ghost workers’.

She said the department was busy calling staff who did not get their salaries, to submit their documents. Sizani encouraged government workers to engage her office with issues affecting them.

“We are independent and we will be able to assist.”

Provincial health spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said the department needed R960m to extend 8,000 workers’ contracts but it had only secured just over R400m to extend the contracts of Covid-19 general workers and community healthcare workers for 12 months and other categories such as nurses for three months.

Kupelo said once all the paperwork had been loaded onto Persal, workers would be paid.

“Either they will be paid on the 15th or on the 30th or the department will do a supplementary run,” Kupelo said.

“Hiring the workers was the first phase and we then needed to load people [Persal] onto the system and that process needed to be verified. So we must still check if these people exist before we pay them and that process has to be done.

“There are processes of submissions, authorisation, and then payment — after verification. So there’s no dispute on this issue; people are going to be paid, others have been paid,” he said.

“It would have been irresponsible for the department to just sit at a desktop and look at a spreadsheet and then just pay people, because you might pay ‘ghosts’ if you do that, especially since the department is limping as far as finances are concerned.”