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MBABANE – The Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS) has welcomed the additional number of students to be awarded scholarships, but call for all students who had been accepted in tertiary institutions to be awarded.
SNUS President Colani Maseko said as a students’ union, they appreciated that government added the E45 million to accommodate those students who did not get scholarships.
Maseko said, however, they were still calling for all students who had been accepted to study in any tertiary institution in the country to be awarded scholarships in order for them to pursue their studies.
He said recent events like the E15 million given to Ingatja, who attended the Incwala Ceremony, showed that government could afford to award every student scholarship.
Maseko said for government not to award other students scholarships showed that it did not have the students’ interests at heart.
He said some students who were not awarded scholarships last year eventually dropped out of tertiary institutions, as they realised it would be hard for them to pay their tuition fees.
Meanwhile, SNUS also stated that the increase in the scholarship fund would only cater for 17.5 per cent of students, who qualified for tertiary education.
The union’s Wakhile Lukhele said they welcomed the move by government, but the increase in the number of students to benefit was too small compared to the number of pupils who complete and pass Form V.
To be precise, he said the number of students who sat for the Form V examination last year stood at around 28 000 pupils, of which around 20 000 passed and were eligible for the scholarships to further their studies in institutions of higher learning.
“This, in essence, means that the government is only providing scholarships to a mere 17.5 per cent of the total students who qualify for tertiary and should be sponsored by the administration,” Lukhele said.
He said it was for this reason that as SNUS they demanded and encouraged government to increase its funding towards the education sector, particularly by increasing the number of students it awarded scholarships to at least 10 000.
Commitment
He said once this was done, it would show that there was commitment towards achieving a 100 per cent scholarship sponsorship for all students, who would be admitted to the various tertiary institutions in the country.
Furthermore, he said they also called upon government to provide employment opportunities for the youth and graduates, so that they could be able to pay back the scholarship for others to benefit too. He emphasised that this would assist in re-filling the scholarship purse to allow and enable government to fund and provide more students with scholarships.
“Government should also employ other means and strategies to raise more money to fund the youth because we understand and strongly believe that the future of any country lies heavily on the youth,” he said.
Therefore, he said if government had any realistic prospects of seeing the country succeed, it should consider prioritising and increasing funding for the youth in general and education in particular.
On the same note, SNUS Legal Officer Vuyiswa Maseko said according to their analysis, this changed nothing to them as students and their parents who paid taxes. He said they believed that as long as the criterion used to award the government scholarships was not transparent to the public, then the whole process was like hide and seek.
“Kufana nekutsi ngumabhacelane,” he said in vernacular.
He said SNUS, as a movement for all tertiary students in the country, believed that a sign that would show that government had prioritised education in the country would be when they would all wake up to the news that the administration would sponsor all students who would be admitted to institutions of higher learning in Eswatini.
“Sponsoring 3 500 students in a population of about 1.2 million people, where about half of that populace is the youth, is not enough at all,” the SNUS legal officer said.
It is worth noting that Prime Minister (PM) Cleopas Dlamini highlighted that statistics suggested that an average of 17 000 to 18 000 pupils finished high school each year, but only 5 000 were able to go to tertiary, which meant that 12 000 to13 000 people do not go to institutions of higher learning. The PM added that according to the statistics, from the 5 000 who went to tertiary, only a few were able to get jobs.