HELB CEO Reveals How One Can Avoid Loan Penalties
The Higher Education Loan Board (HELB) Chief Executive Officer, Charles Ringera, in an interview on Spice FM, March 11, disclosed how defaulters could avoid the Ksh. 5000 monthly penalty charge on matured loans.
Lydia Kadima 
He explained that many HELB beneficiaries were accumulating a lot of penalties yearly since they didn’t know how to avoid being penalized.
The CEO disclosed that graduates could avoid the penalty by paying any amount to the board once their loans are due. The system automatically stops crediting your account once payment reflects.
"If your account is due and you pay something small like the airtime you use in a day, the system usually gets confused, and it does not charge you the penalty. That is the literacy we want to teach our customers," he said.
He revealed that the HELB body waives the penalties for defaulters who become consistent in paying their loans.
"The truth is that nobody pays that Ksh5,000. It is usually debited to your account, and in the process that you start paying, we usually waive it by 100 percent," he added.
Ringera also advised the loanees to visit HELB offices and detail their loan repayment plan as the board always listens to the pleas of its customers.
During the interview, the CEO noted that most graduates fail to pay their loans, and the loan defaulters from 2013 to 2018 owed the state amounted to almost Ksh.3 billion.
At the start of the month, HELB announced a 100 percent penalty waiver on all defaulters for sixty days following the financial constraints most Kenyans are facing. HELB beneficiaries should take advantage of this offer while it lasts.
