Offers of bribes, collusion to fund ghost schools and long hours are the complexities faced by National Department of Education officers tasked with implementing the 2012 Tuition Fee Free Policy.
The revelation is reported following an interview between Development Policy Centre’s Grant Walton, and Peter Michael Magury, a statistical manager with the NDoH, and who is currently working with the National Research Institute.
The report in devpolicy.org highlights that one of the key challenges faced by Magury and his colleagues in implementing the TFF policy was a short timeframe following its announcement in August 2011 and the roll-out the following year.
Despite the challenging long hours at work, the tight deadline, and confusion by schools on how much each school received, Magury and his colleagues were able to ensure three-quarters of all schools registered and had their funding delivered before the start of the year.
However, with the promise of more funding, Magury revealed that some principals and school managers thought they could influence their allocations by offering bribes to speed up the process of inflating the fees for a share in it.
Magury insists that he did not accept any bribes but believes many others have.
Following the roll-out of the TFF, it would soon be revealed that subsidies worth K50 million were paid to ghost schools, which Magury believes was collusion between education officials.
He says these collusions will continue unless the government gets serious about monitoring every level of school administration and producing honest bureaucrats.
This, he says, requires stringent recruitment processes, ethics training and better rewards for merit-based performance.
A full report on the interview can be found on http://devpolicy.org/an-insiders-view-on-education-reform-and-corruption-in-png-an-interview-with-peter-michael-magury-20161018/.
Picture credit: Greek Reporter