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WILL IT EVER IMPROVE?

20/09/2018 04:06:00 By Mangaliso Lushaba

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GOVERNMENT is doing a great job in making sure that Eswatini children do get an education. That is what is expected from it because these children are going to be an asset to government. If they are not civil servants they will be working somewhere and paying taxes to government.

Some people, especially the educated, pay high taxes such that in a year some may have already paid the full amount of the fees government pays on their behalf. But generally most have it paid back in 10 years (just for argument sake).

So in all the other working years of the person government is getting money to do other things and I would call that profit for it on its investment in educating that particular individual. These are the people who will pay this money through tax. But in our case the people have to pay back the money despite that this is money derived from the people’s taxes. Let me leave that for another day.

My worry today is what we have now started witnessing these days and it appears to be a yearly event now. That is the closure of tertiary institutions because government is failing to pay what it promised to pay. It is either tuition fees or allowances for students. I was anticipating that this would not happen this year for different reasons.

One of the reasons being that government has been engaged in a drive to have all previous beneficiaries pay back the scholarships that were paid for them and we were told that there was a good response, which means government is recovering money that it was not recovering in the past.
Another reason which I have always mentioned is that government is the one awarding scholarships and it knows the amount of money it has before it awards the scholarships. Why then does it experience problems when the money is supposed to be paid?

I may be wrong but my view is that government is failing its investment when it fails to pay for the students. If the students do not cover enough in their educational year, then the end product, which is the workforce, will not be good enough and, therefore, government will not get its value for money.
Even the standard of education when compared to other countries seems to be going down and the reason may be that the students have to spend time away from class with each academic year because of government having failed to make good to what it promised. Our university, for example, used to be rated highly and had good products to show but this is no longer the case.

I am not sure if the situation will ever improve because school administrators are also complaining that government is not paying schools on time what it is supposed to pay. They are always complaining about late payment and the lame excuse most of the time is that some administrators have not done some of what they are supposed to do. I say this excuse is lame because in my understanding, government has a budget for these monies and it knows what is to be paid in each school.

Why then should one school not be given the money and those who have not submitted what they are supposed to submit not be given the money? This also speaks to government’s ability because those who have not submitted on time should know that there is a penalty for late submissions than frustrating those who submitted on time. What is the incentive for submitting on time if all are going to suffer just because of those who filed late?
My concern is that this is getting worse than being better. I also fear that very soon this will tend to be normalised and government will always know that it can fail in its duties. This also tells me that government does not care about the welfare of its people yet education is provided for in the Constitution. To put it bluntly, this means that government does not respect the Constitution and if this is allowed to go on, then government will go further and violate even the Bill of Rights. I do not mean that government respects those rights as reports have shown that it violates most. Government is supposed to make sure that it takes care of the education of the nation because there would never be meaningful development in the country if its citizens are not educated. The more educated people are, the more tax government is going to get. But I am afraid that the situation is not improving but instead it is getting worse.