HUYE— Butare Workers’ Cooperative known by its French acronym as CTBU formerly  UCT, has made a loss of Rwf 100million since 2006.

In an interview with The New Times about the operations of the savings and credit cooperative, Jean Baptiste Ntirushwa, the chairperson of CTBU, explained that the loss accumulated due to defaulting in refunding by customers who received credit  as well as financial mismanagement by former UCT managers, before it’s  transformation  into the new outfit.

"It is a heavy burden to recover this debt because we inherited it. Consequently we have a substantial amount of bad debt in our books,” Ntirushwa said.

During a meeting of CTBU shareholders last Sunday June 14, held partly to discuss the way forward, Martin Kampayana, the national president of worker’s cooperatives called on members with outstanding arrears  to sort out their debts. And he warned of legal action against prominent defaulters.

"Those who still have debts should clear them without waiting to be dragged to court in order to avoid paying a fine,” Kampayana said.

CTBU was created in 2006 after government suspended the operations of all UCTs due to mismanagement. In spite of this loss however, 2058 active members of CTBU say that they are committed to improving the operations of their cooperative.   

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