The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) is facing pressure from lawmakers after a new report revealed serious problems in how it handles teachers’ salaries.
The report came from Auditor General Nancy Gathungu and covered the financial year ending in June 2024. It found that some teachers were overpaid, and the total amount of the overpayment was Ksh433.9 million.
This problem was blamed on TSC’s continued use of manual systems to report and process payments, which are prone to mistakes.
Even though the Commission managed to recover Ksh222.3 million of the lost funds, there is still Ksh211.6 million missing.
These findings have triggered concern in the Senate, especially from Kisii Senator Richard Onyonka. He has demanded a full investigation into the matter to understand how such a big error could happen.
Onyonka said that the government needs to confirm the number of people currently on the TSC payroll and whether all of them are properly employed and verified.
He believes that the errors point to a deeper issue in the payroll system that needs to be addressed immediately.
Onyonka also raised another serious issue during a meeting with the Senate Education Committee. He referred to another part of the audit that found the Ministry of Education had sent money to schools that do not exist.
This, he said, was a sign of mismanagement and poor oversight in the education sector. According to him, this kind of carelessness wastes public money and damages trust in public institutions.
He urged the committee to make the Ministry of Education give a full report showing how much money was lost due to fake schools or fake staff.
As these concerns were being raised in Parliament, Education Cabinet Secretary Julius Ogamba was also speaking on the matter.
In an interview on Egesa FM, he announced that the Ministry would take strong action to get rid of ghost schools in the country. He said a special task force would be formed and would work with the Auditor General’s office to find out where the fake schools are and who is behind them.
Ogamba made it clear that anyone involved would face arrest once the investigations are complete.
These developments show that the education sector in Kenya is currently under serious review. Both the teachers’ payroll and school funding systems appear to have major flaws that need to be fixed.
With the Auditor General’s reports now attracting attention from both the Senate and the Education Ministry, the pressure is mounting for TSC and the Ministry of Education to clean up their records and prevent further loss of public funds.
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