FARG to update survivors’ database

KIGALI - The acting management of the Fund for Support to Genocide Survivors (FARG) has announced plans to embark on a campaign to verify the fund’s database as one of the priorities during their three-month transitional mandate. The three-man team headed by Theophile Ruberangeyo, took up the fund’s leadership late last week after Prime Minister Bernard Makuza sacked the Executive Secretary, Ildephonse Niyonsenga and his team for failure to deliver and suspected mismanagement of the fund. “We want to first clean up the list of beneficiaries, so that we can come up with the bonafide people who are supposed to benefit from this fund,” said Ruberangeyo yesterday during a press briefing at the fund’s offices at Remera. He added that non Genocide survivors are on the list of beneficiaries while those who are supposed to be there are not. He said that they were going to move from house-to-house registering the needy survivors. “People who are not supposed to be on the list are the ones causing problems and using the government’s money illegally,” he said adding that they would even scrap survivors who are not needy from the list. “You cannot retain a governor’s child or any other person who is well-off on the list that is supposed to be for needy people. We will scrap them off,” he vowed. Students could be seen the whole of last week, flocking the fund’s offices after being sent back from their respective schools because they were not on the list of beneficiaries. Ruberangeyo says that this chaos has led to a big number of students to miss school since the fund cannot be able to sponsor all of them. FARG is sponsoring a total of 40,963 students from primary school to university and of these, 29,823 have not been able to go to school due to lack of financing from the fund. Speaking at the press briefing, the Permanent Secretary in the Local Government Ministry, Eugene Balikana, urged the new team to work hard and put the fund back on track. He said that all the past leaders had failed to perform to their expectations and deserved to go since government cannot tolerate such people. He criticized the dismissed Executive Secretary for his failures which he has turned into blames where he goes around saying that Local Government has failed him. “How do you expect to be kept in the office when you cannot do what you are supposed to do?” he questioned, adding that Niyonsenga had left a pile of paperwork that he had not signed in the last five months. Ends

National

FARG to update survivors’ database