THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

Sir,

The technology nowadays is amazing! And yet government’s computers can’t store the information of people who are on scholarship loans. When the prioritisation of courses began some years ago, a significant number of people who had been admitted to the University of Eswatini couldn’t get government scholarships. The only reason was that too many people who had finished university on government loans had not paid it back, and therefore government did not have enough money.  I do not know if this didn’t make sense only to me, but to this day I’m still failing to understand why. When, in the same year, the Ministries of Education and that of Labour and Social Security started misplacing student files, it became apparent that our government lacked a great deal in the management of important information.

Logic

Even today it still beats logic as to why a whole ministry still uses hard copied files to store information on thousands of students when a simple device can do a better job. We have children in this country who are continuously using Google or the internet to find answers. Why is it that our government can’t? The lack of a follow-up to regain government’s money from ex-students has bruised and dented a lot of young people’s futures. Nothing kills a young determined soul more than being turned back and directed to a career one was not passionate about, simply because it is one of the few options.

Education is an essential tool for achieving sustainability. People around the world recognise that education, training and public awareness are key to moving society towards sustainability. It is curious to note that even though we might have difficulty envisioning what a First World Eswatini will be like, it is not that difficult to identify what is not sustainable in our society. We can rapidly create a laundry list of problems that the country is currently faced with - unemployment, poverty, HIV/AIDS, abuse of power, corruption, lack of human rights, road accidents, passion killings etc. But we should not beat ourselves up just because we lack a clear definition of ‘First World’.

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