MOST EDUCATION LOAN DEFAULTERS STILL 'HIDING’

HESLB Executive Director, Mr Abdul-Razaq Badru.

As the Higher Education Student’s Loans Board (HESLB) finalises preparations to publish names and pictures of education loan defaulters, only 31.6 per cent have so far come out and started repayment.

The HESLB Executive Director, Mr Abdul-Razaq Badru, told the ‘Daily News’ that by yesterday, only 45,000 defaulters out of 142,470 had heeded to the instruction. Late last year, HESLB instructed the defaulters to clear their debts within 30 days or face legal action.

They owed loan’s board about 239.3bn/- After 30-day ultimatum expiry, HESLB announced that it will start publishing names and pictures of chronic defaulters who graduated in the last ten years effective this month.

A taskforce formed by loan’s board has also started visiting employers for verification on deductions, remittances and names of the institutions’ graduate employees who benefitted from the education loans.

“We are seeing loan beneficiary turning up to make payments... there is an increase compared to previous months. Last week we had 42,000 defaulters making their payments but today (yesterday) the number has gone up to 45,000,” he told ‘Daily News’ yesterday.

The HESLB in late December last year announced that it will start publishing names and pictures of chronic defaulters who graduated in the last ten years effective this month, following the expiry of a 30-day notice. Mr Badru said the list of names alongside pictures of the defaulters will also be placed in different databases so they can easily be identified.

He said the HESLB is in the last process before releasing to BISHOP Raphael the public the list of names and pictures of chronic defaulters who continue to defy the call to payback the education loans. “We are still completing some legal procedures before we can release the names and pictures of the chronic defaulters to the public,” he explained.

The HESLB has for sometime been hounding loans defaulters to repay the loans, threatening to take them to court and denying them government scholarships or admission to postgraduate studies in any higher education institution in or outside the country, unless they get loan clearance from the board. Recent action taken by HESLB have now started bearing fruits forcing the chronic defaulters throng the loans board premises seeking to repay the education loans.

Amendments to the HESLB Act No. 9 of 2004 have increased the amount to be deducted from graduate salaries from 8 per cent to 15 per cent as well as increasing the grace period from 12 months to 24 months.

“We had initially proposed an increase of 30 per cent from the 8 per cent, but we settled for 15 per cent as proposed by stakeholders,” he said. Education loans that have matured and ready to be repaid amount to 300bn/- out of which 140bn/- has already been collected.

The list of beneficiaries who have not paid loans includes those who took loans between 1994/95 and 2005 when the then Ministry of Higher Education was charged with the role of issuing loans to students. When HESLB started operations in 2005, it took over the responsibility of pursuing payment of loans amounting to 51.1bn/- that had been issued by the ministry to 48,378 students.

By June 2016, a total of 379,179 Tanzanians had benefited from HESLB loans since the board’s establishment in June 1994.

The amount issued to these beneficiaries has reached 2.6 trillion/-, according to Mr Badru. A total of 238,430 former students were supposed to have started repaying their loans after the expiry of the grace period, amounting to 1.4 trillion/-.

Daily News