UPE: Teachers Work,
Officials Grow Rich
The thousands of classroom blocks built to accommodate the millions of new pupils who have enrolled in primary school under Uganda�s Universal Primary Education programme are simple no-frills affairs.
Unlike urban private schools, they don�t have flush toilets (they make do with pit latrines), and the compounds don�t have flower gardens.
So, how much does such a simple UPE classroom block cost? That depends on who�s in charge of building it.
Recently, a good citizen who has been helping to build UPE classrooms gave me an insight into the business. He chairs a committee that is in charge of building UPE classrooms in a rural area.
His committee is thought of highly for being honest. It gets classroom blocks built for about Ush42 million ($23,000) each.
In other parts of the country, as recent findings have shown, Ush42 million isn�t enough to build anything. It�s only sufficient to line the pockets of local government officials, councillors and contractors.
However, our man is also involved in community efforts to build private schools.
A private initiative that he chairs builds slightly better classroom blocks than the UPE ones for about Ush30 million ($17,000) � Ush12,000 ($7,000) less than the government one.
So, how does he explain the difference? He thinks it is because private initiatives allow for more imagination, and because you have to let the government people on the committee have their way on issues such as choosing the contractor and deciding which river the building sand will be collected from. In that way, a few fellows manage to add in a bit of fat that they cream off in the contract.
The result is that the people who make the most money out of education in Uganda, and other African countries no doubt, are not the teachers, but folks like contractors, suppliers, school accountants and quartermasters.
Because the people who gain most from the incentive system are not teachers, our schools cannot produce rocket scientists. The chap who sells food to a school or university regularly adjusts his prices upwards to keep up with inflation. But the teachers have to wait for the Minister of Finance to raise their pay once every three years or so.
And while the supplier who sold beans infested with weevils to the school gets paid sometimes before he even delivers, the teachers go without salaries six months after they have taught.
In Kenya recently, the teachers went on strike to claim a salary increase that has been delayed for four years. In Uganda, letters by teachers to the newspapers claim some of them haven�t been paid since July last year.
It�s perhaps not surprising, then, that when I read about the pay some American college presidents get, I threw cold water on my face and read it a second time just to make sure I wasn�t hallucinating.
A survey of 595 private American colleges has found that 27 of them paid their presidents over $500,000 (Ush920 million) a year. Claire Gaudiani, the Connecticut College president who resigned under pressure with a half-million dollar severance pay package, walked off with nearly $900,000.
After her, the next highest paid president last year was Judith Rodin, president of the University of Pennsylvania. She earned $808,021! That�s about Ush1.6 billion � almost enough to build a UPE classroom block in each of Uganda�s 52 districts.
It gets better. Many academics in these universities earn far more than their presidents. At Vanderbilt University, the highest-paid official is the vice chancellor for investments. He earned $3,217,311 (Ush6 billion) last year.
If there�s a lesson here, it�s that if we want to go to the moon and invent a vaccine for malaria, our schools must begin paying teachers and faculty heads more than the plumbing contractor, and the principal�s wife who holds the tender to supply the college her husband heads with posho.
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Charles Onyango-Obbo is Managing Editor of The Monitor newspaper of Uganda.
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