Stop embarrassing people, SLB

THE EDITOR, Madam:

WERE I a victim of this tactless and unprincipled ploy used by the Students’ Loan Bureau (SLB) to embarrass unfortunate loan borrowers into paying up, I would have put measures in place to stop that practice immediately, were I to have been conferred with such powers.

The ‘name them and shame them’ approach employed by the SLB is not only uncouth, but uncompassionate.

The current prime minister, a victim of this unmerciful and humiliating system in 1996, according to a story published recently, should have made it his mandate to immediately put laws in place to prevent other student from having to encounter such humiliating experience, resulting from this ignominious action of the SLB.

We are not advocating for students to borrow and not repay. What we are saying is that a more respectable and principled approach ought to be taken by the SLB to recover what is owing to it.

The SLB has not displayed any compassion or compunction with regard to the method being used to get students who are in arrears to pay up despite outrage from students, parents, and influential Jamaicans. As a matter of fact, as recently as 2018, lists of names and photographs of errant student loan recipients were still being published.

However, it is still not too late for the PM to intervene in order for some appropriateness to be injected into the approach that is currently being used by the SLB.

NURVILLE MCLEOD