Officials ordered to refund Shs30m taken from parents

MUKONO. The Local Government Accounts Committee of Parliament has ordered the Mukono District chief administrative officer, Mr George Ntulume, and the district chief finance officer, Ms Olivia Kalenge, to refund Shs30m which was collected from schools under Universal Primary Education programme to purchase a bus.

Mr Ibrahim Kasozi, the committee chairperson, said the Auditor General’s report of 2015/16 indicated that Mukono District has been illegally collecting a fee from UPE schools for four years to buy a bus but it has never been bought .
The directive was made during a consultative meeting of members of the committee convened at Mukono Municipality headquarters on Tuesday.

Mr Kasozi said the district council passed a resolution to buy a bus for UPE schools and illegally ordered head teachers to collect money from parents. The district has 187 UPE schools and each parent was paying Shs1,000 per term.
Mr Kasozi said the district collected the money without seeking clearance from the Ministry of Education as required by law.
Ms Betty Nambooze, a member of the committee and also the Mukono Municipality MP, demanded a report from the schools that contributed towards the purchase of the bus.

Call for report
“We need a report from each UPE school so that we can know how much money each school collected per year during the four years and we want this money accounted for,” she said.

In his defence, Mr Ntulume said he was posted to Mukono a year ago and found when the bus project had already kicked off, adding that the money has been deposited on the district capital development account.

“I advised the executive to sit with head teachers and use this money for other projects than buying a bus since the collected money was not enough,” he said.

Both Mr Ntulume and Ms Kalenge together with the district education officer, Mr Vincent Baraza, were given up to Tuesday next week to prepare a report and submit it to the committee.

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