Africa-Press – Namibia. Windhoek,20 August 2021-Last year the Government with the Ministry of Higher Education made a deal with NSFAF to provide students with laptops to the value of N$180 million to help them with online learning whereby the GRN would meet students halfway. An amount of N$3 000.00 had been deducted from students’ non-tuition fees as a contribution but up to date no laptops had been provided. In July 2021 Kandume (NSFAF CEO) told students through the Confident newspaper that the distribution of laptops would commence during the second week of August 2021, but up to now nothing was distributed and no official announcement regarding this was made.
At the beginning of June this year NSFAF announced they started paying a portion of N$5000 to senior students but shockingly some students (especially 4th year students / 2018 awardees) up to date didn’t receive anything even though the majority of students received theirs already in June. Now payments have stopped suddenly with no reason availed to them. The very same event happened in 2017 to final year students whereby they didn’t receive their whole amount of non-tuition fees as per their contracts even though NSFAF is claiming that it has paid all.
Upon hearing that the students will demonstrate, they started paying few students, but the majority still didn’t get their money. Other students received the money at the end of May while some were told to remain patient. According to some students, they are busy with research projects and don’t have money to carry out their projects and NSFAF was their only hope.
According to one of the students “they organised 2 WhatsApp groups for the demonstration that was supposed to happen last week Friday regarding the issues. The student leader however has stopped the students from demonstrating, telling them to remain patient. Everyone on these groups had posted the problems they are facing with NASFAF and then the group leader had summed them up. He asked them to forward it to all the media. Students feel like NASFAF has failed them by not delivering what was promised.
