Photo courtesy csmonitor.com
A school being built in Afghanistan with foreign contractors and funds from American taxpayers has become a money pit that is not even safe for students, a U.S. government watchdog said.
The Mazar-e-Sharif school in the northern Afghanistan region of Balkh, one of 16 schools built in the war-torn nation under a U.S. Agency for International Development plan, has been deemed structurally unsafe, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko. But the faculty and students assigned to the school are so frustrated that they had been holding class there, anyway, according to Sopko’s report, which was released Wednesday.
After five years of construction, the school is still not completed and will require multiple repairs before it can be transferred to Afghan authorities, a report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office said.
Some of the building’s problems included leaks, crossing sewer lines and an incomplete electrical system that has numerous deficiencies, the report said. The architecture is so poor that a second floor terrace slopes into a classroom, causing floods whenever it rains, according to the report. The report said critical structural calculations were missing during the audit, which was called “a significant oversight” given the chances of a roof caving in or collapse of the septic tank system.
The investigation was conducted
during visits in March and October 2013 and focused the audit on the Mazar-e-Sharif school.