Madigele promises to pay broke institutions
Innocent Selatlhwa | Thursday January 19, 2017 16:21
Even though they shy away from disclosing what the government owes them, Mmegi has established that a number of institutions are owed tuition fees for students sponsored by government through the normal sponsorship programme and those in the Target 20, 000 programme initiated last year January.
“The situation is bad that some are even retrenching.
It was worsened by discontinuation and reduction of sponsorship for some courses said to be saturated in the market. The institutions find themselves in a difficult position as they do not want to be seen as rubbing the government the wrong way by making noise out of it,” a source said.
Another source said some private universities depend on bank overdrafts to pay staff and other bills. This affects their profits as they end up paying for these overdrafts at exuberant charges. “The private institutions have no choice but to ask banks for overdrafts. What can they do in this situation? They don’t want to be on the wrong side of the Government which is the main source of their revenue,” said the source at one of the institutions.
Madigele admitted that there were still outstanding fees to be paid to the institutions. “Part of the supplementary budget of P1.3 billion we requested at the close of last year will be used to pay the institutions.
The situation is a cause for concern and we will try hard to avoid it or minimise it in the future,” he said. Madigele said it was not that they are bad with budgeting, but there are some unavoidable factors leading to that.
“Our aim is to sponsor students until they complete studies.
We have since been experiencing an increase in students requiring re-sits and retakes leading to the stretch of our budget. Also the institutions increase their fees at different times and that affects our budget,” he said.
Madigele said although they wish to increase the number of sponsored students, it becomes difficult as the fees keep increasing and end up tying up their budgets.
The president of Botswana Association of Private Tertiary Education Providers (BAPTEP), Roshen Kishun said the Government continues to pay the institutions. “We at Ba Isago have been paid.
We will only find out at our next meeting as to who could still be owed and how bad the situation is.
So far the issue has not been brought forth as an agenda for the next meeting. We believe that the Government is executing its obligation despite the delay,” he said, while shedding light on the BAPTEP activities.