HUYE–Lecturers at the National University of Rwanda (NUR) are demanding arrears accumulated from supervising students’ dissertations. A number of lecturers who spoke to The New Times on condition of anonymity alleged that they are yet to receive payment for the service since 2010.Others claim that they were also not paid for working overtime, saying the issue had a destabilising effect on both the morale and quality of work rendered. “Last year, a number of lecturers did not really cross-check students’ dissertations,” disclosed a lecturer.“Some claim that there was no reason to continue putting in more hours on students’ memoirs yet the university seemed not bothered to clear the debts,” he added.“Many of us just attributed marks basing on how they appreciated students in class, not on what they wrote in their dissertations.”Another lecturer alleged that the institution owes him about Rwf 5 million. He said some of the dues owed to his colleagues amounted to almost eight million.Normally, lecturers received Rwf 100,000 per dissertation supervised with a 30 percent tax deducted.When contacted, Dr. Charles Karangwa, the Chairperson of the Academic and Research Staff Association of the National University of Rwanda (ARSA-UNR), admitted that they approached the university administration to sort out the issue.“They promised to pay the money soon. What is important is the will to settle the issue,” Dr. Karangwa stated.However, in a phone interview with The New Times, NUR Rector, Prof Silas Lwakabamba, said he has never received any complaints from the lecturers. “Nobody has come to me to ask for that. [They should] come to me and we see how to handle it,” he said, but observed that “memoir supervision is part of the normal work” of lecturers, for which they cannot claim any extra remuneration.“Supervising memoirs is part of their normal job, and they are getting a salary for that job. They cannot claim for an extra salary while they are being paid for that,” Lwakabamba maintained.He noted that since 2009, staff members at the university received an extra 50 percent increment on their salaries, adding that the total cost of the increment is about Rwf 100 million per month.“They got extra money and should therefore be ready to work extra-time. They were used to receiving memoir fees before they got the 50 percent increment. “Obviously, we will have to choose between memoir supervision fees or the 50 percent additional money They cannot claim for everything”.
