BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – School principals and teachers have been ordered to give owing pupils results so that they can be able to secure their future.
This order was issued by Minister for Education and Training Owen Nxumalo yesterday after announcing the Form V results at the Ministry’s headquarters in Mbabane. Nxumalo said it was fortunate because he was saying this in the presence of Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) Secretary General Lot Vilakati and Eswatini Principals Association (EPA) President Welcome Mhlanga.
“We know that many of these children owe school fees and I urge the principals not to withhold their results because they need such to continue with their education and I plead that they should not be frustrated,” Nxumalo said. He proposed that the solution in this case would for the teachers to engage parents and guardians of these pupils to find out how they would be paid.
Nxumalo clarified that they, as a Ministry, were not saying parents should not pay, but were saying pupils should not be frustrated in the process. He said teachers and parents should make a payment settlement that would force parents to pay the maney.
He said the problem was that head teachers would run schools as if they were their private properties, where they would do as they pleased. That, according to Nxumalo, was not encouraged because this made the head teachers to look bad in the eyes of the public. Nxumalo urged parents and pupils who would encounter problems of being denied results to approach their Regional Education Officers (REOs), who would then escalate the matter to the Ministry of Education and Training.
