The Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) this week interrogated the head of Human Resources at Kyambogo University, Richard Manana, over allegations that some middle level staff at the university are holding two government jobs.
The CID was acting on whistle blower information showing that besides working with Kyambogo’s Directorate of ICTs (DICTs), the concerned officials are also employed with Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) another government entity.
Public service standing orders prohibit such practices especially if the officials are working full time in both entities.
We have been told that CID is at least investigating four Kyambogo staff, telecom engineers, who continue to be on two government payrolls-both at Kyambogo and CAA.
These are: Joseph Katongole, Samson Zziwa, Philemon Wenganga and Hedson Kisitu.
We have been told that some of them had hastily offered to resign their Kyambogo jobs to circumvent the CID investigations.
But the the university’s management led by the Vice Chancellor, Prof Eli Katunguka has refused to accept their resignation insisting that they can only be let go after they satisfactorily explain themselves about the discrepancies relating to the government’s multi-billion automation project called Academic Information Management Systems (AIMS).
The objective of AIMS was to block financial leakages and improve service delivery at the same time.
It’s the system that all public Universities use to ensure students coming from S6 can electronically apply for courses they want online without having to physically travel to the campus.
The same system makes it possible for the students to use their phones to pay tuition in the bank without travelling to line up as it was in the past.
However a whistleblower now alleges that this system has been manipulated by some officials at Kyambogo University leading to a loss of at least Shs 15 billion between 2006 and 2011.
The money was allegedly stolen as a result of a syndicate between some banks and university officials.
Under the syndicate, a student would pay Shs 10,000 but get a bank slip or receipt showing they paid Shs 1.5m as tuition.
The administrators working with shady bank tellers would share the Shs 1 million plus, be shared by the thieving administrators and the bank officials.
Katunguka instituted an audit and discovered the fraud.
Also, as part of this fraud, it is alleged that some of the Kyambogo IT administrators acted quickly and incorporated a company which was contracted by government to serve as the process partner in the rolling out of AIMS to other universities.
Their job was to design, develop and install the AIMS system for all public universities.
Now a whistleblower wants Lt Col Edith Nakalema to investigate this company which claimed copyright of the AIMS project.
Sources told us that the system in fact belongs to the government of Uganda which paid them to develop it and not vice versa.
The whistle blower said the fraud aimed at cheating the government.
We have been told that CID has already questioned and taken documents from Kyambogo Director HR Richard Manana about this anomaly and some staff might end up being arraigned in courts of law to answer criminal charges.
The problems escalated recently when the entire AIMS system was switched off for a week something which paralysed processes at Makerere University and other public universities.
Makerere bosses, sources said, protested by writing a confidential letter to the President who took interest in the matter.
We have been told that Janet Museveni, the minister of Education and Sports, also got concerned because she feared that switching off automation services for such a long time could lead to chaos and a strike at public universities.
