By Motselisi Sekonyela
With the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology (LUCT) first semester of the 2021/2022 academic year drawing to a close this week, the school’s Students Representative Council (SRC) claims about a 100 students have not yet received allowances from the National Manpower Development Secretariat (NMDS).
The students are seeing out the semester which started in September 2021 by writing final exams that started last week.
SRC vice president, Tumisang Ngatane, accuses both NMDS and the school for this ‘inconvenience’.
Ngatane alleges the school failed to send students’ results from the preceding academic year to the NMDS on time, and accuses the latter’s staff of being ‘slow and incompetent’.
“Our school was supposed to send the results to NMDS soon as they were published in August 2021 to avoid being blamed for any delays.
“This delay has forced some of the students to drop out midterm due to financial strain. Those that remained are unable to attend classes because they don’t have transport money to travel to school. Many students are trapped in debt as a result.”
However, NMDS public relations officer, Moeketsi Rankhone, says number of students who are yet to receive their allowances is being grossly exaggerated.
“We are almost done with LUCT. At the moment the number of students who are yet to receive their money is less than five.
“The students themselves are guilty of failing to provide correct banking details to the NMDS. The account numbers they provided to the NMDS turned out to be incorrect and we are currently working on rectifying that discrepancy. However, we will have paid all of them by the end of this week,” Rankhone told theReporter on Monday.
