EDUCATION SECTOR TURNED INTO JOKE

It is almost three weeks now and a majority of tertiary students are basking in the sun at home doing absolutely nothing. Indeed, the saying ‘there is no hurry in Eswatini’ should be adopted as the official slogan for the Government of the Kingdom of Eswatini.

On paper, the Strategic Road Map 2019 -2022 has prioritised education as one of the key sectors for reviving the economy. Yet the Government of Eswatini has no shame to just ignore the really critical issues that are posing serious penalties on people’s lives.

Instead of taking action to restore order and continuity in the education sector, government has simply taken a chill pill and is just happy to see things playing out for the worst, as they currently are.
Should everything turn into crisis before the kingdom’s government can spring to action to intervene?

Remuneration

If it is not about securing remuneration packages for politicians and the various Emabandla in Eswatini, everything else takes a back bench with our government.

While it is on a serious mission to improve the state of business in the economy, maybe government needs to be reminded that it is still responsible for all the other social issues that are currently threatening to destroy the lives of emaSwati.

Three weeks is a long time for tertiary students to be sitting at home waiting for our government to decide their fate on how much of their education allowances will be cut this year and how the pennies will be disbursed to each student. In fact, why fix a system that is not broken? The monthly disbursement of the allowances through Mobile Money will come with huge transactional costs to the already struggling university students. Every year the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET), together with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, is always happy to wage a war on tertiary students on simple issues that could have been fixed a long time ago.

Perhaps the problem is not about the student allowances. It could be that our government is taking advantage of the already bad situation to hide from the fact that it simply has no money to subvent the various tertiary institutions in the country.

Allowances

At the same time, it also cannot afford to disburse the student allowances in bulk as it did in the past. The stark reality is that the government cash-flow challenges are now infringing on key performance areas of service delivery such as the provisions that need to be made for the education and health sectors in the country.

What is worse is that the MoET is a huge money pit that claims well over E3 billion of the G-wallet each year. Despite the large amounts of money burned through the education sector, the MoET and their colleagues at the Ministry of Labour and Social Security still find it a struggle to finance tertiary students in the country.

As I wrote this article pupils were going back to schools that had not received their Free Primary Education grants while the education administrators keep occupying offices and bleeding the G-wallet in administrative and remuneration costs.

Let us face it; the Ministry of Education and Training is a huge administrative cost to government that needs to be overhauled. The issue of scholarships and student allowances is so basic it should have been sorted ages ago.

These should not be the problems of the 21st century, especially for a country that is trying to attain First World status. Each year the issue of funding tertiary education in this country keeps getting worse, yet past beneficiaries of these scholarships are now required to pay back the money they enjoyed when they received their scholarships.

Why isn’t government using the money being collected from past beneficiaries to pave a way forward to fund the current cohort of tertiary students?

Expenses

News flash; the scholarships are considered loans that need to be repaid, so government must ensure that current tertiary students get decent funding for their education that will enable them to meet all their education and reasonable living expenses so that they can focus on being in class rather than taking to the streets to demand their fair share from government.

Surely, if there is money to go back in history and pay spouses of former politicians, if there is money to pay people sitting allowances to deliberate non-critical issues in the different Boards and Commissions, then surely Eswatini should have money to secure the future of our young generation. Enough with letting basic issues escalate into crises that end up pushing the country back into a Third World nation.

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