Public university officials, including lecturers are demanding for reasonable salary pay to attract qualified people.
They say their salary is too low to sustain their living.
Late last month, Minister of Higher Education Science and Technology, Yien Oral Lam, issued a ministerial order appointing a technical committee to review the salary of the university administrators, academic and none academic staff.
Abraham Matoc Dhal, Vice Chancellor of Dr John Garang Memorial University of Science and Technology, appreciates the minister for giving the university a chance to look into the salary structure.
‘We congratulate the Minister in advance and the president for giving the universities the chance to look into this important subject of salary review. Across the universities, they need at least a reasonable salary structure that can keep the staff in the universities and that can also attract qualified staff’, Matoc said.
Matoc calls for the development of human resource to build up the country through education.
‘For that, it is important to develop the human resource that can contribute to the development of the country and for that reason it needs to be taken care of. Now the salaries are too low and the lecturers are running away from the universities and that’s a problem. Which means, there will be no teaching and definitely, the output or provision of quality services will not be there and students will be graduated with low standard and that’s not good’, he stresses
A Lecturer from the University of Juba, Dhieu Chol Arok says what they proposed is more reasonable to retain and attract academic staff.
‘The current salary structure was established in 2015. What we did is to take the current salary structure in SSP and convert it to USD. For a professor, it will be over 6000 USD. So we are taking only twenty percent of that. Then convert that into SSP, it will give us about 1,431 dollars and when you convert that into SSP, it gives us over 200,000 SSP’, the lecturer clarifies.
Minister of Higher Education Science and Technology, Yien Oral Lam, comments that it is important to review the salaries because of the current inflation in the country.
‘It is important for us to review the salaries so that we maintain the lecturers. I don’t have figure of how much it is proposed. But I do believe that the current proposal is very significant and reasonable.
South Sudan professors’ pay is the lowest in East Africa, for example a professor receives 136 US Dollars compared to 5,000 US Dollars for a professor in Uganda.