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SANU, ECU GRADUATES STRUGGLE TO GET JOBS

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MBABANE – They wore their graduation gowns with pride thinking their lives were going to change for the better but that was not to be.

Students who studied the medical laboratory technology course and graduated at the Eswatini Christian University (ECU) and the Southern Africa Nazarene University (SANU) have come out to pour out their pain of not being able to find employment. While the situation is not as serious for the ECU graduates as they only graduated recently, it is a painful story for those from SANU as some of them graduated way back in 2016 but have still not been hired. In 2016 alone, about 20 students graduated for the course at SANU but only four have been employed by government. The number of graduates for the year 2017 stood at 21 all of whom are looking for employment even today. Making the situation worse is the fact that this week about 20 are expected to graduate for the year 2018, which means that they will add to the number of graduates who are sitting idle at home. The frustrated graduates shared their experience with this reporter last week saying they felt government was unfair to them.

In their view, the country’s lack of job opportunities is not the only problem that is making their lives difficult but other factors as well. One of the factors, according to the graduates, is that government had continued to make use of the on-call schedule in most of the laboratories, which has reduced their chances of being employed. “We believe that on-call shifts were introduced by the government back then because the country was experiencing a huge shortage of laboratory human resources and had to make the most of what was available,” said one of the graduates. Another view by the frustrated technologists was that the on-call shifts had not only contributed to the increased government wage bill and youth unemployment but had also led to a drastic decrease in service provision in the laboratories. On-call shifts are processes used where employees’ work schedules are intentionally unpredictable.

Employees who work on-call are expected to be available at any time of day or night, usually with short notice, to carry out their duties. “Service provision is affected due to the fact that on-call shifts only allow the personnel to attend only to emergency calls, leaving other routine tests to pile up for the following day. At times patients who submit their samples for various tests have to wait for months before they can get their results,” another student alleged. Some of the graduates alleged that they had made countless efforts to send applications but that the senior personnel always emphasised on the lack of available opportunities. Another allegation by the students was that government had put people in the laboratories who were not qualified for the job as they had only graduated under the Bachelor of Science.

Some of the students who graduated in 2017 confided that they went through interviews in March this year at the laboratories but that nothing positive had come out of it. This, they argued, was a sign that there was something wrong especially since in other departments like nursing and pharmacy, graduates wrote interviews and got hired within a space of two months. When probed why they were not trying their luck in non-governmental organisations and private hospitals, the graduates argued that they faced challenges. “If there are vacant posts in NGOs, they forward them to the senior technologists who coordinate the hiring process. In the end, they keep on calling the same individuals for interviews some of whom already have jobs. It is like they no longer do proper short-listing but just retrieve names available in the archives,” the students alleged.


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