The minister for Education and Sports Janet Museveni’s office has been cited in a Shs 3.4billion procurement scandal.
A number of Mrs Museveni’s most trusted technocrats like Godfrey Dhatemwa (Commisionar Planning), James Oloya (Senior Economist), Daniel Nkaada (Chair Contracts Committee), Patrick Bwayo (Head PDU) and Hassan Hasoho (Procurement Specialist) used the desire for personal gain to get kickbacks off the multibillion 5-year Education Sector Strategic Plan (ESSP) by openly showing bias against certain bidders while dubiously helping others.
One of those opposed to the sham way of doing things became a whistleblower and petitioned the IGG Irene Mulyagonja who directed the PPDA to take up the investigation since it was procurement related.
Now according to the latest report by Cornelia Sabiiti’s PPDA, the grilled Mrs Museveni aides in October 2016 sought to contract the best and most affordable consultant out of Oxford Policy Management in Partnership with Social Economic & Research (SIEIAR), Madecor Career Systems Inc (MCS) and Reev Consult International whose 87% technical evaluation score was dubiously altered to 72.5% (required min. was 75%) in order to favour Adam Smith International/Business Synergies Ltd on the orders of more senior and politically oriented Ministry officials for unclear reasons.
Reev Consult is owned by controversial educationist Prof. Augustus Nuwagaba who is already in possession of the all the information and guaranteed by the unnamed whistleblower to be his ‘star witness’ should Nuwagaba choose to challenge the procurement in court.
Dated 9/10/2016, the whistleblower’s dossier was titled MOE: PR: MoES/SRV/2014-00127: Consultancy Services to Evaluate, Review & Update the current Education Sector Strategic Plan.
ESSP was then being funded by the World Bank and Global Partnership for Education (GPE) specifically to improve the quality in the Universal Primary Education (UPE).
The program is very important because it is what the government uses to attract grants or even loans to the education sector because donors work according to stipulated work plans and projected outputs.
As a result of the mess in MoE’s handling of ESSP bidding process, World Bank went ahead and protested by withholding its funding until Mrs. Museveni’s people put their act together.
Now some prudent Mrs Museveni aides are being singled out for betraying the president who has been pleading with World Bank to resume funding the education sector.
