The fact that teachers who were not paid for their first month of work will get their money at the end of this week is hardly cause for celebration.

The unpaid teachers, who were hired after the beginning of the school term, and teachers with extra responsibilities who did not get their raises at the end of their first month of work, have every reason to be annoyed.

It's bad that they were not paid when they should have been and it suggests that the somewhere in the labyrinth of Government's accounts departments something is wrong.

It is worse that it has taken some 17 days for their pay to actually be made available. The first rule of administration is that you don't mess with people's money; when this mistake was discovered it should have been resolved within 24 hours, not within weeks.

Now Government needs to examine its accounting processes to make sure this never happens again.