Times Of Swaziland: MORE WAITING FOR TERTIARY STUDENTS

MORE WAITING FOR TERTIARY STUDENTS
================================================================================
BY SABELO MAJOLA on 30/08/2019 03:05:00


MBABANE - Tertiary students will have to wait a little longer before the issue
of monthly allowances disbursement is resolved.
Contrary to a press statement calling for students to be patient until today
before getting feedback on the issue, this might not be the case, at least not
today.
The press statement was released on Wednesday by the Deputy Prime Minister,
Themba Masuku.
The long wait is a result of the fact that government has had no time to
deliberate on the issue of the new proposed monthly allowances which students
are rejecting. This is a claim made by Ministry of Labour and Social Security
Principal Secretary Thulani Mkhaliphi.
The PS said students from different tertiary institutions had been frequenting
the ministry throughout the week to deliver petitions, demanding government to
halt the new proposed disbursement system and maintain the semester lump sum the
students have been getting over the years.
“There has been little or no time at all for government to deliberate on this
issue since much of the time was consumed by meetings and engagement with
students who were marching to the ministry to deliver petitions. I can safely
say there won’t be any feedback from government to the students tomorrow
(today) owing to the time consumed while attending to their petitions,”
Mkhaliphi said.
On Monday, students from Eswatini University (UNESWA), Limkokwing University of
Creative Technology (LUCT) and Eswatini Medical Christian University (EMCU)
jointly delivered a petition at the Ministry of Labour and Social Security
through the students’ representatives from all the three tertiary
institutions.
Yesterday, Southern Africa Nazarene University (SANU) students also went to the
ministry to deliver their petition, also rejecting the proposed disbursement
method.
Consumed
These are the events that Mkhaliphi cited to have consumed the time that
government would have spent deliberating on the issue.
On the claims made by the students that they reached a verbal agreement to have
the monthly disbursement of allowances halted during a meeting between the two
parties on Tuesday, Mkhaliphi said there was no such agreement.
He further mentioned that he was quoted out of context by the students as he was
trying to elaborate on a significant point.
“The point I was trying to make was that students cannot have both the upward
review of allowances and the lump sum semester disbursement.
“Students’ representatives were opting for the current lump sum semester
payment and it was explained to them that if the lump sum payment was to be
used, the upward review would be dropped for the current academic year.
“This was not to say we are coming to any agreement on the issue,” explained
Mkhaliphi.
The same explanation is contained in a letter that Mkhaliphi confirmed to have
drafted and copied to the students’ representatives after the meeting on
Tuesday. About the letter, Mkhaliphi said the ministry informed the students
that it still intended to disburse the money in 30-day intervals but students
indicated that they were not willing to take that as an option.  “Students
were adamant and refused to take this as an option even when there was
commitment from the ministry that the current internal discussions were towards
reviewing the allowances upward,” reads part of the letter.
`