Morobe education official: K300,000 borrowed from schools

By GLORIA BAUAI
Morobe’s education division has borrowed money to maintain operations so far this year, says programme adviser Keith Tangui.
“We have borrowed about K300,000 from different schools in the province,” he said.
“It’s illegal but we’re doing it to run the province because we have had nil funding since January.”
Tangui said this borrowed money went to cater for logistics to channel hard copies of important documents like teachers’ resumption of duty summary sheets, records of attendance and commencement of new graduates.
“Running a very big division in Morobe without funding is a big problem right now,” he said.
Tangui said the division needed more than K18 million for annual administrative operations of 374 primary schools, 880 elementary, 16 Tvet and 32 secondary and high schools.
He said unfortunately, the limited amount allocated to the division by the provincial government was currently on hold by the Ombudsman Commission.
Last month, OC issued a direction under Section 27 (4) of the Constitution, to control the expenditure and distribution of public funds during the General Election 2022 (GE22).
OC stated that the main intent of the direction was to ensure public funds were used for the purposes allocated for and not for any other purposes, especially during GE22.
Tangui said once the restriction was lifted, the schools that loaned money would be paid back.
He said schools were not directly affected by the funding restrictions for now because of sufficient government tuition fee subsidy, K12.2 million provincial schools infrastructure development grant and parental components.