How universal is USE?

Vincent Nuwagaba

President Museveni promised to introduce Universal Secondary Education (USE) during the 2001 campaigns. His initial promise was that USE would begin in 2003. However, it was promised again during the 2006 campaigns as he faced his stiffest challenger Dr Kizza Besigye for the second time. In 2007, “USE” began albeit without proper preparation by the government.
If one hears the term, they think, it is secondary education for all. This however, is a fallacy. Recently, I took time to interview staff and parents of Kigarama Secondary School in Bitereko Sub County, Mitooma District about USE. The findings are appalling!
Kigarama SS is a government-aided school implementing USE. It has 28 staff members comprising 18 teachers and 10 non-teaching staff. None of the support staff is on the government payroll and only 9 of the 18 teaching staff members are on government payroll. I was told the school should ordinarily have a laboratory attendant, librarian, matron, nurse, messenger, security guards, cooks, store keeper and at least two secretaries. The school has one secretary, one storekeeper, one laboratory assistant and one librarian all of whom are paid by the parents.
What I found revealing is that the government disburses a paltry Shs 41,000 on each USE student. Yet feeding alone, if a meal is estimated at Shs 1000 costs Shs 65,000 for thirteen weeks in a term. Both the teachers and parents confirm that government reimbursement is less than 10% of the school’s basic needs per term. In fact, some schools have withdrawn from USE and many others had applied for withdrawal but the government refused because the number of the applicants was enormous. While the government occasionally gives boom for laboratory equipment (which it only did last year worth 4m) – the school spends so much on laboratory equipment – 10 million at a minimum annually this is only when the school does fewer practicals otherwise the school spends Shs 15m annually.
As for the salaries, the school pays 3.2m monthly to staff members that are not on the government payroll. Since USE started in 2007, it is only in 2010 that the school got a textbook and laboratory equipment boom of 7m and 4m respectively. This raises a question as to whether or not this government works in the interest of the masses. This is a party which says is a mass party.
The non-USE schools are often granted huge sums of money from the government budgetary allocations. The reason given is that the people dividing the national cake are products of such topnotch schools. The solution to that should be for the down-trodden schools to demand for affirmative action in the allocation of jobs to their alumni. Shockingly, the school has less than five alumni positioned in influential government departments and most of those there are underdogs.
As for textbook, I was told that government gave textbook boom worth Shs 7million to the school only in 2010 yet the school spends 12 million annually on textbooks. The school also spends on sports – taking students for interschool matches, uniform, coaches, etc. Term one has sports gala while term two has athletics. The annual school vote for sports alone is Sh 4million.
In all, the school I was told, spends 120,000/= on each student yet students pay Shs 70,000 and government remits only Shillings 41,000 per student. This means the school operates in losses. Thus, one wonders, how universal is USE if government cannot remit enough funds for the education of the students under the scheme? Before government embarks on Universal Advanced Level Education, let it first implement UPE and USE. As of now what the government pays for UPE and USE pupils and students is negligible and any parent who doesn’t have money at all cannot have their children in school – the availability of UPE and USE notwithstanding. What is long overdue, however, is the university students’ loan scheme.
Mr Nuwagaba is a human rights defender
vnuwagaba@gmail.com