Nust castigated for demanding full fees payment to access lessons

The Southern Stars Foundation is appalled by the behaviour of the leadership of the National University of Science and Technology through its actions of denying students without full payment of registration fees access to lessons.

As a Foundation, we are concerned that NUST being a government Institution itself and knowing fully well that the government undertook the onus itself to paying fees for the students through the Cadetship Program, but NUST decides out of its own wisdom or lack of it or both to hold students accountable for the government's failure to deliver on their commitment.

As a Foundation we are further disheartened of the sudden shift by the NUST leadership from the traditional attitude of allowing students to pay fees through instalments to demanding full payment afore-front. Surely this demand is unwarranted and has no basis whatsoever to justify it.

The Southern Stars Foundation would like to issue a strong condemnation to the leadership of NUST and will want to tell them that their behaviour is Anti-Educational development in this region and can only be only be seen as an Academic Gukurahundi generated, fanned, orchestrated, marketed and implemented by ungrateful beneficiaries of the State's free University Education System.

We have no doubt that the architects of this new policy of barring students from lessons and de-registration of students were and are beneficiaries of free or sponsored education by Western powers or sponsored Institutions. As a Foundation, we find the behaviour by the NUST leadership narcissistic, counter developmental and against the spirit of the Liberation of this country and seek to undo all that our Founding fathers of this country fought for. The stance taken by the NUST leadership is incredible and proof of arrogance and ignorance of true reality that the nation is going through an economic crisis.

These actions if they go unchallenged and thwarted at these early stages will breed and groom a generation of illiterate, uneducated young people whose future is bleak and surely translating into the death of any envisaged progress in this region. As a Foundation we would like to make it clear that we will from this moment onwards engage in an advocacy mode, we will support the cause of the NUST students and see to ti that this issue comes to a desirable end. The students whose parents are peasants and underpaid workers cannot be condemned to illiteracy.

We have engaged a Team of Lawyers under the banner of Abammeli Human Rights Lawyers Network to represent students to attain their rightful legitimacy to be allowed back into their classrooms.

We would like to seize the moment to appeal to the Chancellor of the National University of Science and Technology president Robert Mugabe, who is a learned man with many degrees to his name and is on record as being a statesman committed to educating the nation , to intervene in this self-aggrandisement and Academic onslaught on unsuspecting students by the leadership of NUST. We implore the President of the country and Chancellor of NUST to use all means necessary to make sure the country breeds more learned and shining stars that will raise the flag of this nation high.

At the end of it all we would like to assure our brothers and sisters at NUST of our unwavering solidarity, we will walk this dark phase of Academic struggles together and like the students of SOWETO in 1976 who rose in defence of their Academic Rights, we will prevail and sanity will be resorted again at NUST.

We are hopeful sanity will prevail at NUST and students be allowed to continue with their studies under the cadetship programme and instalment payments.

We remain resolute in pioneering the rights of free education and NUST must be held accountable to full free and mandatory education of citizens in this country.

   Khumbulani Malinga
   Programmes Co-ordinator
   Southern-Stars Foundation
   admin@southern-stars.org
   +263 774 208 375