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Sir,

It is agonising and heartbreaking to be a poor liSwati child. You endeavour with everything you have to liberate yourself from poverty, but there are forces which make sure that you don’t succeed. These forces are those who get everything they want.

Tears

I want to say to those who are living in poverty, cry so loud so that they can hear your whining and let your tears be a great river so that they can taste how bitter your tears are.

Deep down in my heart, I do believe that we will be liberated from poverty one day. They have been preaching to us that education is the key to success, but they make it impossible for some of us, who are poor, to gain education.

Reject

They don’t care how much money has been invested in your education, they just reject you. Yet some of us want to work in our country and make it a better place for everyone who lives in it.

Education is very expensive and some of us have been financing it through working as garden boys, house helpers, baby-sitting and selling vegetables after school. We are doing this so that we don’t become a burden to government, but contribute to the future of our beautiful kingdom.

Money

But when it comes to going to universities and colleges, one has to pay a lot of money just for applying and as a result, some OVCs end up not going to universities because they don’t have money to apply.

No explanation can justify this. What about those who lost their parents

and stay with their unemployed grandparents?

Many have become criminals because they were rejected by their own country. Some of them didn’t have money to apply at universities. This is wasting a lot of money for our government because it has to arrest and prosecute them for petty crimes.

Let us not judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree because it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. While pupils may be 20 per cent of our population, they are 100 per cent the future, so let us attend to their needs.

M Dludlu