Durban - A Chatsworth teacher who was dismissed after being on sick leave with full pay for seven years wants his job back.
The teacher - whose name is being withheld because he suffers from severe depression and bipolar disorder - said he had booked off sick in the last term of 2006 and had not been back at work since then.
In two applications which came before Durban High Court Judge Isaac Madondo on Thursday, not only is he seeking to force the department to consider his application for reinstatement, but he also wants the MEC for education to be declared in contempt of court for ignoring a previous court order.
“I was under care of a doctor for depression and other related conditions … it has made it difficult to attend some administrative matters, so anything which I not have complied with was done inadvertently,” he said in his affidavit.
He said he initially submitted all the relevant documentation at the relevant times - although at once stage he had been reluctant to disclose his medical condition to certain department officials - and had been officially booked off on sick leave although he had applied for “long-term incapacity” leave.
The fact that he received no come-back over the years, he viewed as a “positive sign”.
From 2012, he did not submit any documentation because of “confusion over who to submit it to”.
And then in July 2013, his pay was not deposited into his bank account.
“I called the salaries department and they had advised that I had been discharged for misconduct. I was told the documentation stating the reasons had been sent to my principal. But in response to a letter from my attorney, the principal said he had forwarded them to me by registered post and he had not made a copy.”
The teacher said he did not receive those documents and was given the run-around by various departments over the next few months in his attempts to get them.
His lawyer wrote that they assumed that his services had not been terminated after a disciplinary process but on the basis of the Employment of Educators Act which provided for a deemed termination if a teacher was absent without authority for longer than 30 days.
“Our client remains blissfully unaware of why his services were terminated and cannot lodge an appeal against this,” his lawyer complained.
Finally, after the intervention of an official in the human resources department, the teacher received confirmation of the reason in November 2013 and immediately prepared and lodged an appeal.
In it he denied absconding and said in the main he had complied with the rules about sick leave.
In March last year he received notification that he had now been put on sick leave with no pay, but there was no word about his appeal.
In November he launched the first high court application, obtaining an order taken by consent that his application for reinstatement would be considered before January 15 this year.
In his contempt application launched on Thursday, he said that had never happened.
“The date was proposed by the department’s own legal representative, giving it two months to consider my appeal which had been lodged in November 2013.
“At the end of January, the department wrote saying the ‘reinstatement committee’ had convened and a recommendation had been sent to the head of department who would take a decision soon,” the teacher said.
While the recommendation was that he not be reinstated, any final decision on the matter had not been communicated to him, again preventing any further appeals.
“No explanation has been given for the department’s failure to take a decision. There has been complete disregard of a court order which was taken by consent,” he said.
In terms of orders taken on Thursday, the department agreed to pay the costs of the contempt application on a punitive scale.
The department was given permission to file more papers in the main application for reinstatement.
The Mercury