By Brenda Acen 

Sixteen educationists in Zombo District have been implicated in allegations of abuse of office and corruption-related practices involving deviations from the proper Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE) registration process for private schools without centre numbers.

In a resolution meeting held at the district headquarters on Wednesday, key education stakeholders and security authorities held a dialogue with head teachers of private and government schools over reported errors in their procedures for registering candidates sitting their final exams.

One of the implicated head teachers, Francis Okethi of Palei Primary School, received 40,000 shillings from each of 29 pupils from a private school, Elisabeth Primary, for registration of P.7 candidates.

Peggy Awekonimungu, another head teacher from Zombo Lower Primary School, admitted pupils of Acamukech Primary School, a community school, as learners under the Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme at a fee of 15,000 shillings levied on the 15 candidates.

District Inspector of Schools Jalar Silvio noted that this is the sixth year since electronic registration was introduced by the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB). 

He guided that the UNEB registration fee is 34,000 shillings for each learner in the district, payable by learners in private schools while those in government schools are paid by the government. 

An extra 10,000 shillings is charged for the service provider to meet administrative costs during the registration process.

Private schools without centre numbers are supposed to write to the office of the District Inspector indicating where they intend to register, to assist in monitoring purposes, Jalar added.

In Lwala Primary School, head teacher Mary Mananu admitted registering pupils from a private school as those under UPE instead of non-UPE after receiving 782,000 shillings for registration of 23 candidates. 

She alleged that she used 320,000 shillings for administration and management.Patrick Angala stated that the implication of this is payment of a surcharge of 100% of the initial 34,000 shillings so that these pupils can be registered again.

According to the UPE registration guideline section 8, any centre discovered to have non-UPE candidates registered as UPE will have flouted the Ministry of Education and Sports guidelines on who qualifies to be a government-sponsored candidate. 

Such a centre shall be charged the registration fee of 34,000 shillings, a surcharge of 34,000 shillings, and an amendment fee of 50,000 shillings for each candidate.

Zombo District Internal Security Officer (DISO) Ashiraf Ajobe warned that corruption in Uganda is a major crisis that slows down economic growth, ruins public services, and drains trillions of shillings from the national economy every year.

He advised that in the next academic year, head teachers in government-aided schools should not implicate private schools owing to this interrogation.The security team informed the head teachers that they committed offences of false information, abuse of office, obtaining money by false pretence and others that await investigations if handled criminally according to the courts of law.

Resident District Commissioner (RDC) Festus Ayikobua stated that the arrested are 16 primary school head teachers in total, but investigations are still ongoing into the matter in accordance with the presidential directive “Kisanja No Sleep.”“Kisanja No Sleep”..

“If such money collected is eventually shared between the school heads of the private-owned and government-aided schools which brings forth the question of who will be responsible for the children registered whose number is inflated, this is corruption and conspiracy to cause a loss to the government,” Ayikobua explained.

He added that every stakeholder in Zombo should report any corrupt conduct, as these are some of the reasons the district is lagging behind in many sectors such as inadequate health services, poor road network, and a retrogressive system of education.

Corruption in Uganda is widespread, characterised by low-level bureaucrats seeking bribes and grand-scale theft of public funds by political elites, as well as widespread patronage networks. 

Public procurement is vulnerable due to the lack of transparency in transactions that happen within the government.