After a ruling by the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC), a former KwaZulu-Natal teacher’s claim for R40,000 in unpaid salary and bonus has been dismissed, following her confirmed dismissal for misconduct.
ELRC Commissioner Nolundi Shezi dismissed the unfair labour practice application brought by Kalayvan Govender against the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education, concluding that she had no legal entitlement to a salary once her statutory employment contract was formally terminated.
The roots of the dispute trace back to January 2025, when the department dismissed Govender following a disciplinary hearing that found her guilty of serious misconduct involving the submission of a fraudulent qualification certificate.
Seeking to overturn the sanction, Govender launched an official appeal directly to the office of the KZN MEC for Education.
However, the MEC rejected Govender’s appeal and upheld her dismissal in January 2026.
Due to communication breakdown between the MEC’s office and the provincial department’s human resources division, the Pinetown school district was never notified of the final decision.
Despite the dismissal, Govender continued to show up to work and successfully received a full salary for January, February, and March 2026.
The department’s administrative oversight came to an abrupt halt when Musawenkosi Dlamini, an internal investigator for the department’s Fraud and Ethics Management unit, intercepted the MEC’s January order.
Upon discovering the paperwork error, Dlamini issued an urgent directive to the Pinetown district in April 2026 to freeze Govender’s profile and immediately halt any further state funds from being processed.
Consequently, when the standard provincial payday arrived on April 15, 2026, Govender received no salary. She subsequently walked out of the school the next day and never returned, later filing an ELRC dispute claiming an unfair labour practice and demanding her April remuneration alongside her birthday bonus.
During the hearing, Govender claimed that she had no knowledge that her appeal had failed until June 2026, arguing that she deserved to be compensated for providing a direct service to the school up until mid-April. She argued that receiving official digital payslips proved her continuous employment.
However, the department countered that the post-dismissal earnings were purely the result of a standard administrative error and confirmed that internal mechanisms have already been initiated to claw back and recover the salaries erroneously paid out to her between February and March.
In her final analysis of the evidence, Commissioner Shezi accepted the department’s explanation that the February and March salary payments resulted from an administrative oversight after the appeal outcome had not been promptly implemented. Since Govender’s employment relationship had already ended once the dismissal was upheld, the commissioner concluded that she had no legal entitlement to continue rendering services or receiving remuneration.
Commissioner Shezi found that the department had established a valid reason for stopping payment after learning that her dismissal had become final.
The ELRC ultimately ruled that Govender had failed to prove that the department committed an unfair labour practice by withholding her April 2026 salary. Her application was dismissed in its entirety.