Ghost mates

I am currently reading for a Diploma in Project Management, which requires me to attend evening classes on block basis per month whereby each block lasts only 5 days. In my class, there are a lot of individuals working in the medical profession as nurses, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and counselors. We are coming to the end of our studies and I have noticed that most of the nurses have hardly been to schools in the past three blocks. Some of them are members of my group and because we are required to do certain assignments in groups, their absence has greatly subtracted from our group effort. In frustration, yesterday I phoned up one of them, and what she told me made me regret having been miffed at them in the slightest.
The three nurses are apparently going through rough times being tossed around in the current civil service audit that is being undertaken after allegedly huge numbers of ‘ghost employees’ under the government payroll were unearthed. The exercise has necessitated their putting in some extra hours of work, just so that when the goons come, they find them in place. It has seen one of the nurses go home all the way back to Honde valley to unearth her certificates where she had left them in the care of her grandmother. It has also meant that in order for these girls to pass the diploma, they continue to pay fees for lectures they are not even attending, just so they are not struck off the record at the eleventh hour.
The Public Service Ministry has, since April this year – been carrying out a human resource audit to steam out idle civil servants who continue to burden the fiscus.
Teachers and especially nurses are being asked to supply their educational certificates all the way down to Ordinary Level results, and proof of nursing qualification and graduation. While I appreciate the importance of this exercise, I can only imagine how traumatic it must be for individuals who are in fact honest civil servants and have continued to serve under such unpalatable conditions only to be subjected to such.
It is alleged that over 9000 youth militia were recruited from the green bombers country wide towards and during the harmonized election and smuggled into the government payroll. These youth militia have been central in maintaining a certain statusquo and have been notorious for harassing ‘opposition’ members.
Thanks to the unscrupulous political shenanigans of a cruel few, these nurses have certainly become ghost students in every sense. Soon they will have ghost Diplomas, perhaps?