Why wage fraud in the education sector in the DRC will be difficult to correct

The primary and secondary education sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) faces major challenges. These include insufficient budgets, salary fraud, a lack of infrastructure and teaching materials, and poor professional development opportunities for teachers. Education officials are not held responsible for political failures.

One of the main obstacles concerns the teachers’ payroll. In general, the country’s teachers – over 500,000 – work in dire conditions. In particular, a significant number of teachers in the DRC have not been paid by the government for several years. Since the early 1990s, parents have been called upon to intervene to financially support teachers and schools by paying significant tuition fees. Providing quality education is not always at the top of teachers’ priorities, as they find it difficult to supplement their income with other activities.

Two years ago, the government decided to abolish primary school fees. The idea was that the government would pay all the teachers. However, based on our long-standing engagement with the education sector and the political system of the DRC, we believe this will be a challenge due to political, budgetary and administrative issues.

In April of this year, Tony Mwaba, one of the fiercest critics of corruption in the education sector, was appointed as the new Minister of Education. The move followed convictions of former education officials, including the former education minister, of corruption and money laundering.

Is this the start of a serious reform of the battered education sector?

We believe that a lasting change in this system would require an in-depth restructuring of the mechanisms of political accountability. In the meantime, we can only expect a realignment of existing patronage networks on the political agenda of the current president.

Sponsorship networks

In November 2020, the auditor general of the DRC published a report which revealed the extent of the wage crisis. Masses of teachers remained unpaid while new ones were added to the payroll. There has also been an influx of administrative staff, diverting resources away from teachers’ salaries. The report revealed the embezzlement of 62 billion Congolese francs (around $ 30 million) and other forms of wage fraud.

Wage fraud permeates the public sector, and it is a persistent problem in the DRC. The report involved senior officials and staff from the ministries of budget and finance, education and the teachers’ pay agency. The issue also reverberated in the provinces. Several officials were placed under arrest.

The border between “state” and “society” has become a twilight zone in the DRC, the dynamics of which are governed by specific social pressures, economic rents and political considerations. For example, relationships with politicians, due to party affiliation or origin, increase a school’s chances of being added to the payroll. Another example is the attempt to remove 1,179 schools from the payroll. As the reactions of education officials suggest, some of these schools have been functioning well for decades. In the past, masses of other schools obtained their decree through informal processes, devoid of any educational planning. What is the difference between schools operating on “false” decrees, and schools operating on decrees based solely on patronage without any technical preparation or control?

Government actors who benefit from the current structures have little incentive to clean up the wage bill. However, the policy of teachers’ unions also partly explains this continuing dynamic. There is a lack of strong and independent unions and a lack of trust between teachers and unions. Likewise, political co-optation of union leaders, for example by mobilizing them as consultants or inviting them into party politics, has weakened the impact of unions. Out of 40 unions, only a handful can be considered to be functioning properly. With a dozen pseudo-unions and a high number of barely functioning unions, the Congolese teachers’ unions have effectively been silenced.

Possibility of reform?

Attempting to reform human resource and payroll management means taking a massive resource of patronage and electoral politics away from hundreds of bureaucrats and politicians.

Public statements to fight wage fraud seem to materialize at strategic times. In 1979, the former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), Mobutu Sese Seko, declared that:

We are going to destroy imaginary schools and bogus teachers that only exist on paper.

For Mobutu, it was a means of attracting financing from the World Bank.

So what was the reason for the most recent announcement? The investigations, and the appointment of Mwaba, are nested in the Congolese political dynamic, and we must look beyond the education sector.

For 15 years, according to our sources, the education ministry has functioned as a cash cow for the party of longtime leader Joseph Kabila. When Félix Tshisekedi was elected president in 2019, in what is considered a rigged election, he formed a coalition with Kabila. The investigations and convictions of senior education officials are part of Tshisekedi’s much broader use of “judicial harassment” against key people in Kabila camp.

As Tshisekedi’s coalition remains unstable and based on parliamentarians who “will condition their support to payments or extractive opportunities”, he will need all possible sources to raise funds. This is all the more the case as the DRC is impatiently awaiting a new round of elections in 2023.

So this is the situation in which the president finds himself: while the judicial inquiries and the new appointment indicate that it is a question of using the wage bill for clientelist purposes, now that he himself is completely in power, Tshisekedi might be tempted to deviate from the standards by which he earned his post.

With an education sector struggling to cope with the politics of patronage and informal arrangements, and with all the high-level dynamics at play, can the new Minister of Education make the necessary changes? We really hope so, but he should swim against the tide.

For a longer French version of this article, please see here .

Stylianos Moshonas receives funding from the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders), through a fundamental research project entitled “Understanding the political economy of the recruitment and remuneration system of the Congolese civil service”, in which he works as a researcher postdoctoral.

Cyril Owen Brandt, Gauthier Marchais, Jacques Taty Mwakupemba and Tom De Herdt do not work, consult, hold any shares or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have not disclosed any affiliation relevant beyond their academic appointment. .

By Cyril Owen Brandt, Associate Researcher, Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp And

Gauthier Marchais, researcher, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and

Jacques Taty Mwakupemba, PhD candidate, Catholic University of Bukavu And

Stylianos Moshonas, postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp and

Tom De Herdt, professor, University of Antwerp