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Kenya’s Universities Academic Staff Union (UASU) has threatened to go to court if the ministry of education does not take immediate action against the higher learning institutions in the country that are reported to be deducting from their employees’ salaries illegally without remitting deductions to the relevant institutions. Last month the ministry of education released an audit report showing that some public universities in the country were deducting billions of shillings from their employees' salaries and not regularly remitting the money to relevant agencies. The amount the institutions have been deducting illegally from the employees’ salaries is alleged to total approximately US$100 million.

Two people are in hot water after allegedly defrauding the Mpumalanga Department of Education of an estimated R6-million. The two appeared in the Nelspruit Regional Court on Thursday over their alleged involvement in a bogus school-feeding scheme. The Hawks said that in 2011 the accused allegedly submitted several fraudulent invoices to the Department of Education for services never rendered. An employee of the Department of Health allegedly recruited owners of various companies to submit these invoices. The money was allegedly deposited into the said businesses accounts, as well as individual accounts and was subsequently withdrawn and shared amongst the syndicate.

Nigeria’s Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, or JAMB, is the latest agency to come under the spotlight in what is a national crusade to get rid of corruption in higher education. Past registrars of the agency, which is mandated to hold entrance examinations for all students into tertiary institutions, have been asked to give an account of their stewardship and how they managed the agency’s finances. The probe comes in the wake of revelations that JAMB has managed to remit to the Central Bank of Nigeria an impressive total of US$14 million – the highest annual remittance in the last 40 years.

Tanzania’s flagship University of Dar es Salaam is under investigation by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee for the mismanagement of university funds. An audit report for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 fiscal years presented to the parliamentary committee earlier this month shows that approximately US$0.5 million was lost on unretired imprest from workers and US$0.2 million on salaries to ghost workers at the university. The committee chairperson suggested that poor financial management at the university was behind the losses.

The Government has set up a new audit body to crack down on corruption in schools. The body to be known as Directorate of School Audit (DSA) will be tasked with scrutinising the use of the billions of shillings sent to schools. According to the Education Principal Secretary, DSA will examine books of accounts to identify the expenditure leakages and report back to the ministry. School heads found to have presided over theft or misuse of the money will be forced to bear the responsibility.

Education Cabinet Secretary has described the auditing system used in Kenyan schools as a “big joke” and a great let-down and accused auditors of colluding with headteachers to give favourable reports even when money has been lost. He also decried the inappropriate use of free learning cash and the distribution of government-purchased books in schools and described the system of assessing the performance of teachers as still substandard.

The President has ordered an audit of how public primary and secondary schools have spent the billions in free learning cash released to them across three years. Free Primary Education funds were first rolled out in 2003, with each child getting Sh1,020 per year. In 2014, the Jubilee government increased FPE to Sh1,420 to cater for an estimated enrolment of about 10 million children in about 23,000 public primary schools. Annually this costs Sh14 billion.

Nationwide school audits were this year expected to cover over 80 percent of the 8 179 schools in the country, of which 5 805 are primary schools, while 2 374 are secondary schools. While the exercise has so far been producing results and unearthing massive irregularities and abuse of funds at Government school institutions, there are reports that schools are being asked to fund the exercise.