MONTHLY ALLOWANCES: STUDENTS SIGN FORMS, BUT ...

MANZINI – It appears that government has emerged victorious in the battle of disbursing tertiary allowances to students on a monthly basis.

This is because at long last, students from the country’s top three institutions, namely; University of Eswatini (UNESWA), Southern Africa Nazarene University (SANU) and William Pitcher Teachers’ Training College have finally signed the pre-service tertiary education study loan agreement forms. 

Lose

This comes after the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Social Security Thulani Mkhaliphi announced on National Radio yesterday morning (Eswatini Broadcasting and Information Services) that any student who would refuse to sign the forms by end of business yesterday would lose their scholarship indefinitely. However, the students were murmuring and chiding as they went about the process of signing the forms. This was because a majority of them were crying foul over government’s alleged ploy of coercing them to sign the forms even though they were still dissatisfied with some of the clauses contained in them.

The students were still bitter concerning certain clauses in the form which they pleaded with government to amend on Monday after discovering that it had major discrepancies which were too much for their liking. Instead of being given amended forms yesterday, the students were given forms that had the same clauses they were appealing for government to amend. This comes after the students frankly refused to sign the addendum forms on Monday, stating that they needed to be amended.  

Discontentment

One clause that brought discontentment to the students was that which depicted  that the details of disbursement shall be shown in the schedule  which may be adjusted by government in any manner it deems fit. The aforementioned clause was a bitter pill for the students to swallow as they asserted that such clause was ambiguous since government could resort to cutting their allowances at any given point in time for no apparent reason. 

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