An 84-year-old former college director has petitioned Parliament to compel Ndejje University to release transcripts and certificates it has withheld from 102 students for up to nine years — despite the institution clearing every shilling it owed the university back in May 2023.
In a petition received by the Office of the Clerk to Parliament on 4 August, Tamali Okao, former director of St. Stephen Nursery Teachers’ College in Lira, says students who completed their courses between 2017 and 2022 have never received proof of their qualifications, have lost jobs and missed further training, while the university has continued printing documents for other affiliated colleges. Okao ran the college from 2005 until her retirement in 2022; the institution operated in Lira Municipality from 1995 and was affiliated to Ndejje from 2015 to 2022 under a government requirement channelled through the Ministry of Education and Sports.
The petition sets out an extraordinary reversal: the very students whose documents remain locked in the university’s system are now threatening to drag the elderly director to court. Okao states that 15 parents, 12 students and two tutors have signalled their intention to sue, with some sending messages demanding she be arrested. According to the petition, the demands intensified from mid-2026, even as she made repeated trips to Ndejje’s Bombo main campus and its Kampala office to chase the same documents on the students’ behalf.
At the centre of the affair is money the college says it was never given. Okao states that in 2018, 18 students from Karamoja — drawn from Kaabong, Kotido and Abim — were enrolled on government sponsorship, but the promised remittances never came, leaving the college to accrue unpaid dues to Ndejje. The petition claims a whistle-blower in the office of the then Minister of State for Karamoja, Moses Kizige, told the college that Shs66 million meant for the Karamoja students’ fees had been received but never released. Okao says she submitted the matter to the Inspectorate of Government in March 2023, but the IGG later wrote back to say it had failed to locate Kizige and had closed the case. Kizige served as State Minister for Karamoja from 2016 until 2021, when he was appointed Uganda’s ambassador to Russia.
The petition and its annexures also level pointed allegations at Ndejje’s affiliations coordinator, Edwin Kayuki. Okao states that after the college cleared its balance, Kayuki issued a demand note for Shs40 million, a figure she disputes; she alleges the sum was inflated after 15 names from another institution, St. Peters College, were transferred onto St. Stephen’s list. She further claims Kayuki told her three times to personally pay the four staff who print certificates, Shs100,000 each, and at one point declined to authorise printing of documents for 72 students. When 16 students threatened legal action in 2022, Okao says a partial payment of Shs10 million produced only 16 certificates and 15 transcripts — of which just two students collected theirs, the rest held back by outstanding college fees.
Perhaps most damning is the account of documents that simply vanished. Okao states that when the college sent a staff member to collect the outstanding list for a fifth time, Ndejje admitted it had lost the records — including transcripts for students transferred from Kyambogo University in 2013/2014, the 29 students Ndejje itself registered, an entire 2015 cohort, and 73 students whose names were omitted from 2016 to 2018, whose photographs the college says it re-scanned and resubmitted in April 2025.
A Ndejje University clearance form attached to the petition, dated 14 April 2025 and stamped by the faculty dean, accounts office and academic registrar, confirms 73 graduands cleared for document release, covering 61 certificates and 12 diplomas. Yet Okao states that as of July 2026 nothing had been printed, with the university variously citing malfunctioning printers and an ICT technician still at work.
Okao says calls to the National Council for Higher Education to intervene yielded little, and that the college brought in a legislator, Dr Opio Acuti, to press the matter. She states that Opio Acuti met the university on 21 December 2025 and again confronted Kayuki the following day, extracting a promise that everything would be ready by January 2026 — a deadline that, like others before it, passed without documents.
Petitioning under Rule 31 of Parliament’s rules of procedure, Okao asks the House to prevail over Ndejje University to release the documents without further delay, to set up a team to investigate other students “suffering in silence,” to direct the Minister of Education to establish a clear escalation mechanism for such disputes, and to have government reimburse the money the college spent clearing the dues of the 18 sponsored Karamoja students.
