Students issue ultimatum to management
Nnasaretha Kgamanyane | Wednesday March 1, 2017 16:34
The University’s Student Representative Council (SRC) president, Kabelo Dikatlholo yesterday told Mmegi that students decided to boycott classes until the school management addressed all of their concerns such as unaccredited courses, lack of qualified lecturers and others.
He said only four of the 48 courses were accredited. Dikatlholo said the students gave the management four days to have submitted all the necessary documents to Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA) for accreditation.
“This decision comes after we were addressed by BQA last week. BQA advised the management to follow certain procedures so that all the courses can be accredited. In the same meeting, we learnt that most of our courses were not accredited because their modules were not correctly outlined. Some procedures were violated. It seems like the University did not do research to determine which modules should be placed in which course,” he said.
He pointed out that they discovered most of their lecturers were teaching courses that they were not trained for, hence passing the burden to the students who have to do intense research in order to pass.
He further said the school does not have an IT lab, which forces them to download some software, so that they could be able to study. “We don’t know how the management expects us to pass in these undesirable circumstance,” he said.
Even though Botho students just like other tertiary institutions have students who have not received their monthly allowances for two months now, Dikatlholo said they wanted accreditation of courses issue to be resolved before they could attend to allowances.
He said 359 students had not received their monthly allowances. Dikatlholo pointed out that their attempts to resolve allowance issues with the Minister of Tertiary Education, Research, Science and Technology, Alfred Madigele and his assistant Fidelis Molao was unsuccessful, as the studets have not been paid to date.
Dikatlholo pointed out that if the University failed to adhere to their plea, they would hold a peaceful demonstration. He added that they, together with other private institutions SRCs, want to hold a massive demonstration as they are facing the same challenges.
Recently, Molao called on all the institutions to ensure that all their courses are accredited and blamed them for the students’ failure to receive their monthly allowances on time, as they fail to submit students’ names to the Department of Tertiary Education Funding (DTEF) on time.
As for the book allowances, the Minister said they had decided to credit it on students’ bank accounts because most of them complained that their tertiary institutions’ bookshops were very expensive. Attempts to get a comment from Botho University management were futile as they referred Mmegi to their agent who has failed to respond.