How ministry of education officials paid themselves KSh10 million to monitor desk distribution
Ministry of education officials paid themselves KSh10 million in allowances for touring the county to monitor desk distribution.
The Auditor General Nancy Gathungu has badly exposed the ministry of education officials for spending millions as allowances for supervising the distribution of desks and lockers as part of the Covid-19 economic stimulus.
The officials from the ministry spent 10 million instead of using county officials to distribute the desks and chairs.
According to Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu, if officials from county offices had been given the responsibilities, the expense incurred by giving day sustenance allowances to workers from Jogoo House could have been avoided.
The effort to build desks and lockers was a component of a Covid-19 economic stimulus program designed to encourage social isolation and support regional craftspeople whose businesses were severely damaged by the pandemic.
Prof. Magoha has been traveling throughout the nation to oversee and commission numerous projects.
Sh10,214,400 was spent on the trips.
“The state department has established offices in all the counties and the staff in these offices could have been used with minimal or no costs. This expenditure was therefore against Section 79(2b) of the Public Finance Management Act, 2012, which states that a public officer … should ensure that resources within the officer’s area of responsibility are used in a way that is lawful and authorized and effective, efficient, economical and transparent,” states the report.
Ms. Gathungu also faulted the mobile money transfer method used to pay the artisans, saying, it’s not prescribed by the National Treasury and therefore is in breach of the law.
Although the ministry sent authority to incur expenses totaling Sh1,897,135,000 to all the 47 counties, no funding was effected and, instead, the payments were centralized at the headquarters and effected using the M-Pesa application by Safaricom.
The ministry has also been using M-Pesa to pay contractors who have been engaged in building classrooms to provide more space during the competency-based curriculum (CBC) transition to junior secondary school.
“No explanation was provided for using a private application instead of using Ifmis being the national payment system as per the Public Financial Management Act, 2012.
Under the circumstances, the management was therefore in breach of law,” Ms. Gathungu observes in her report.
During the project, the ministry supplied 622,357 lockers and chairs to 5,136 public primary schools and 5,254 secondary schools. Every selected primary school received 70 desks while secondary school got 50 lockers and chairs.
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