By NATION REPORTER
GOVERNMENT is being hypocritical and playing to the gallery over its free education stance because most university students are losing out due to high tuition fees as they fail to get student loans, National Democratic Change (NDC) President, Saboi Imboela, has said.
Ms Imboela says she had been receiving a number of complaints from prospective students who had either been left out despite having good results or did not have enough resources to meet tuition fees.
She said the problem was that there was too much rhetoric by the new dawn administration who promised Zambians that they would implement free education from grade one to university but since made a u-turn and had excluded tertiary education.
Ms Imboela said that only six percent of the Zambian population had tertiary education and that looking at the way things were, there was going to be no change as many of the qualified but vulnerable students would continue being left out of the bursaries scheme.
“There has never been a government that is so hypocritical than the UPND administration. They promised us things would be better, they said things cheaper, they promised things would be easier but here we are! Life has become even harder for citizens and the free education is but a mess because only the privileged few were getting bursaries at tertiary education as colleges and private university students have been excluded,” Mr Imboela said.
She said countries like Nigeria had institution funds that enabled government to fund students that were in need.
Ms Imboela said everyday students were protesting for student loans as most of them were being left out which made it very difficult since they came from poor families.
She said some students were even planning to protest because of the unfair treatment they had received at the hands of the new dawn administration.
Ms Imboela said there was need to put politics aside and ensure that the right thing was done for the future generation’s sake.
