In the media

Japan’s Ministry of Education is in the hot seat over revelations that it lobbied universities to hire its retiring officials, a practice known as amakudari (descent from heaven) which is officially banned in Japan. In late 2016, damning evidence emerged that the ministry attempted to conceal its involvement in the case of a retiring ministry official landing a job at Waseda University by distributing answers to anticipated questions so that everyone involved could coordinate a story of denial.

The civil organization called for the six aspiring governors of Mexico State to commit to actions such as debugging the education payroll and providing resources to schools in marginalized areas. "Mexicans have a right to know which candidates for state governor are in favor of educational reform and which are in favor of the comfortable status quo, as well as which candidates for governor are committed to the rule of law and which will continue to allow a series of abuses and omissions of the law," said the organization.

Following a directive in late-2016 of the President of the 5th-Phase Government of Tanzania, verification (by a Special Presidential Task Force) of the academic credentials of reportedly 400 035 civil servants who draw emoluments from Government coffers unearthed much rot! The probe revealed that 9,932 public service employees got where they are today on the back of educational certificates which were either forged outright, borrowed, bought or stolen.

The Ministry of Education has said it is not conducting any recruitment of staff and cautioned Kenyans against being conned. In a statement, the Ministry said: “ We hereby make the clarification as a man impersonating the Head of ICT in the Ministry of Education is collecting money from unsuspecting people as a condition for employment as Data Entry Clerks in the Ministry.” The statement identified a fictional ICT staff member, whom it said designates himself as head of ICT department and asks for Sh2, 000 for purchase of a uniform.

In Latin America, one high-level scandal after another has tainted current or recent presidents or vice-presidents across the region. The price is awful public services, from transport and education to law enforcement and health care, as state coffers are ransacked while appointments and contracts are awarded as favors rather than on merit. Yet, counter-intuitively, the steady stream of grim headlines about kickbacks, influence-peddling and nepotism may actually be good news. Many experts regard the public revelations as a sign that corruption in the region is actually being tolerated less and less.

An official report has disclosed the spread of financial and administrative corruption in Ministry of Education. The report contains the response provided by the Minister of Education at the request of His Highness the Premier Sheikh to the questions presented by lawmakers about the measures taken by Ministry to deal with corruption cases. He explained in the report that a huge number of cases related to forging of educational certificates and misappropriation of public funds have been referred to the Public Prosecution.

Education Minister this morning made her first pretrial appearance in the Windhoek High Court in the case in which she is facing a charge of corruption. She is due to be prosecuted on allegations that she corruptly used her office as Hardap governor in December 2014 to place the names of two of her family members on a list of beneficiaries for the mass housing development programme at Mariental.

KXAS-TV was awarded a 2017 Peabody Award for its extensive NBC 5 Investigates series, “Big Buses, Bigger Problems: Taxpayers Taken for a Ride”. NBC 5’s investigation exposed a web of corruption, staggering financial mismanagement, hidden personal relationships and conflicts of interest inside Dallas County Schools, a public agency responsible for transporting more than 75,000 school children daily in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Over 2,000 primary school teachers from about 27 local government areas of Oyo State protested on what they described as monumental frauds being perpetrated by some officials of the state in connivance with some State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) officials. In Ibadan North Local Government alone, about 109 teachers claimed that the fraudulent state officials fleeced them over N54m from illegal deductions made from their salaries.

There have been issues of cronyism, nepotism, and corruption in the Ministry of Education, subject to performance audits focused on adherence to the Government’s procurement guidelines and contracts management. According to the opposition leader, the allegations are related to the misuse of public funds and to the “politically connected” persons who have been employed by the education ministry as advisers, “but are not doing any work”.