PARENTS, ‘BOMALUME’ CLASH OVER TRANSPORT FULL PAYMENT

NHLANGANO – There was a clash between parents and transport operators who take children to school.

The operators, popularly referred to as bomalume, are demanding full payment of the monthly transport fees despite that some pupils will only attend lessons twice a week. This comes after the rotational timetables that were introduced in the different schools by government. Bomalume are the private vehicle and public transport drivers who especially transport pupils to and fro school from their respective homesteads and they normally receive a once-off payment every month end. While many parents had expected that bomalume would give them a decent discount when taking into account that their children would not attend school every day, this was not the case.

Charged

One parent claimed that she was charged E600 per month and was hoping that the transport operator would lower it to at least E350 or even E400. “However, I was told that such would not happen. He told me that the fee was standard and non-negotiable,” the parent said. She was echoed by another parent who claimed that her pleas for a reduced fee fell on deaf ears.
Many parents are unhappy with this state of affairs as they are of the view that they are supposed to pay for the number of days their children would be transported to school. In an interview with some of the drivers, they stated that the reason behind the full amount was so they could continue ferrying the pupils smoothly compared to when they had to use a lot of fuel to pick up only one pupil, who was attending school on that particular day.

“What is the use of wasting petrol to ferry five pupils to school and drive with nine empty seats,” questioned one of the drivers. They stated that for consistency sake, parents needed to pay for the other days as well. Meanwhile, parents stated that they were being inconvenienced with the arrangement as they did not have money to pay for a child who did not go to school every day. Celiwe Khumalo stated that her child depended on bomalume to get to school every day other than the public transport used by people going to work because it (school transport) would drop them at the school gate than in town. “We wish government could intervene because it will ruin the relationship we had in the past, but mostly our children would be more exposed if they use public transport than the ones that catered specifically for them,” she said.

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