While appearing before the Makerere University Staff Appeals Tribunal yesterday, Edward Obura Peace-Onep, the Registrar of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) said that Joyce Namusoke had confessed to him that she preferred working alone in late hours as he directly pinned her for alleged alterations of students’ marks.
“At one time she told me she works alone in the evening. I would think it was Joyce’s fault. I rely on her testimony and the printouts of logs show her name very clearly,” Obura said.
It should be recalled that while serving as the Registrar in the School of Forestry, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at CAES, Namusoke was sacked in 2017 from the University after she was proved to be altering students’ marks as well as smuggling names onto the graduation list.
The Makerere IT team gives each of the schools’ registrar user rights to enter student’s marks into the Results Management System of the University. However, Obura noted that as a College Registrar, although he supervises the school registrars, he only has reading rights as he emphasized that he had no privileges of entering or making any changes in the system.
According to Obura, Namusoke’s case was detected by Prof. Phillip Nyeko, the Head of Department of Forestry, Biodiversity and Tourism who later informed the Dean of the School. A meeting was later held in which Namusoke confessed that she actually altered the marks.
“At the meeting, Joyce at first said she didn’t know how the marks were changing. Later she said maybe I changed them without knowing. She afterwards accepted she was the one and apologized but she was told she would be handed over to the Academic Registrar to be taken to another place that was not tempting,” Obura narrated.
In Namusoke’s defence, her lawyer Saulo Kikomeko said that the university should be blamed for picking a faulty software and he wants his client to be reinstated, paid her two-years unpaid salary.
The tribunal Chairperson, George Omunyokol noted that the ruling on the matter will be announced.
