Loan providers told to lift ban

The Education Department has issued instructions to its payroll section and loan providers to lift the ban on processing loans following a court order, secretary Dr Uke Kombra says.
Kombra said the department issued circular instructions to temporarily lift the ban from Friday after the court order.
The ban took effect in October last year after it was discovered that some teachers received only a fraction of their fortnightly pay and others went without any pay at all due to deductions.
The circular instructed all salary officers not to accept loan offers, do data entries and effect any new pay deductions from financial loan companies until all individual cases were investigated and corrected through an audit by the payroll.
“I took the decision to stop everything and to investigate these cases because many teachers were paid below K20 and K50,” Kombra said.
“We are here to service the teachers and our mandate is to make sure that teachers are paid on time and that they get their full payments as per their salaries and entailments.
“Our job is not to process finance companies loans, it is basically a supplementary service besides the department’s core function and our core function is to make sure that all teachers are paid on time and paid the amounts they are entitled to get.”
Kombra said the department on the court’s direction had temporarily lifted the ban but investigations were still going on.