HESLB recovers over 216bn/- from defaulters

KATARE MBASHIRU

THE Higher Education Students Loans Board (HESLB) has collected some 216.99bn/, just above half of the estimated 427.7bn/- in loans yet to be recovered from errant beneficiaries.

Until the end of FY 2016/2017, the HESLB had managed to recover at least 13.7bn/-, from willing beneficiaries, according to Cosmas Mwaisoba, the Board’s Director of Information, Education and Communication.

Mr Mwaisoba said the Board issued loans amounting to over 2.6tril/- to 379,179 eligible students between FY 1994/1995 and 2015/2016. He told a news conference in Dar es Salaam yesterday that, during FY 2016/2017, his Board had targeted to recover at least 40% of the loans that had remained outstanding since 1994.

Last December, the Board threatened to publish the names of all loans defaulters, before it later published the names of 142,470 beneficiaries who at that time owed the Board an outstanding 239.3bn/-. To deal decisively with its chronic defaulters, Mr Mwaisoba said, the Board issued a 30-daynotice demanding immediate payment, published the names of its chronic defaulters and made contact with their guarantors in efforts to establish their whereabouts.

The names were later forwarded to the Credit Reference Bureau so that all of them could, in turn, be forwarded to all financial institutions with a view to blocking the defaulters from accessing more loans – all the while threatening court action in case of defiance.

To date, Mr Mwaisoba says, some 139,259 loans beneficiaries had been identified, and were now regularly repaying their loans, according to records valid effective end of last month (June 2017). Of these, he added, some 45,590 beneficiaries were identified between July 2016 and last June.

“ …These owe the Board an outstanding 349.97bn/- and they should have started clearing their debts by now … all their loans are due for repayment,’’ Mr Mwaisoba says.

The Board is also tasked to conduct inspections at work places to trace yet more defaulters – from whom they would be receiving at least 15 per cent in deductions from current employers, at least those willing to work with the HESLB.

“During our inspections … we realized that some employees were providing wrong information to the board …. some were not ready to deduct the 15 per cent from already identified defaulters … or simply refused to cooperate with officials from the loans board,’’ he added