Help us with our allowances
Sir,
I thank you in advance for allowing me space in this publication. I wrote this letter to kindly ask the Minister of Labour and Social Security, Phila Buthelezi, to please help us with our allowances. There are over 20 students at SCOT who still have not received their allowances up to this day and I am sure that there are many students who raised the matter elsewhere complaining about the same thing.
These students were enrolled at SCOT last year August 2021 and they are about to write their exams in a couple of weeks’ time and are expected to pass. Many of us have witnessed that the health of these students is being affected by this matter as they borrowed money from their colleagues and elsewhere with the hope that government would eventually give them their allowances but this has not happened yet others have received their allowances.
When I talk to a few of them, I discovered that there are few of them who are not willing to partake in any protest action to protect the institution’s name, so they say.
Reason
This is the reason why I decided to write this letter and plead with the minister to quickly intervene or at least release a formal promissory statement and apology for the delay because in this instance government has done wrong.
This coming Friday we are going for a break and some students stay as far as Lomahasha and Lavumisa, and because of this they do not know how they are going to make it home and the situation has become more painful. They were promised money the other week and it never came. They were again assured that they would receive their allowances either on Monday or Tuesday last week but as I wrote this letter they had still not received their money. We cannot blame the institution’s administration for that as it had not received anything from the ministry. In fact the issue of promising payments goes way back to January. According to the last budget tabled in Parliament, education is one of the priority sectors, but again government is failing to implement its prioritisation when it has to.
Concerned third year student
NB: Last week government reported that the process of paying allowances had begun.