Universities across the country are finding ways of how they can continue engaging their students in this current lockdown which caused their physical operations. Various private universities have come up with strategies to assist their students on how they can continue with studies in this ongoing lockdown. Recently Victoria University recently announced a five months data plan for its students to successfully attend to online lectures without interruption.
These initiatives are mostly being carried out by private universities while in most public universities students are still struggling with access to online lectures due to poor network connectivity, data costs among others.
Basing on this, Mubiru Benard one of the Guild leaders at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) who serves as the Minister of Social Affairs has appealed to the Government through the Minister of Education and Sports to consider reducing on the tuition and fees paid by students within public universities and institutions. He based on the fact that students are still paying the same amount they used to pay in the normal times before COVID-19 pandemic.
‘’We understand that we are in the difficult times of the pandemic and online learning is the only option right now but let the Government cater about us by reducing tuition and functional fees we pay since we are now studying from home whereby we don’t utilize most of the university facilities yet we are still paying for them. This pandemic affected us all, most of our parents’ businesses were closed in the first lockdown up to now. Regardless of that they continue to look for money to keep us in school but it’s unfortunate that we don’t utilize the amount effectively,’’ Mubiru expressed his concern
‘’Most of our colleagues are in areas where they can’t access internet connection in addition to high data costs to attend to online lectures of which many cannot be afford them without Government’s assistance. The Ministry of Education together with the Parliamentary Education committee can look into this and decide accordingly as it was done on the NSSF rules and regulations. Right now workers who save with NSSF can be able get part of their savings at an early age than it was before COVID-19. This can also happen within public universities and tuition is reduced temporarily within this pandemic,’’ he added.
In his conclusion, Mubiru requested all student leaders, Uganda National Students’ Association and other bodies to advocate for this move in order to save the struggling parents and students in Uganda.
It should be remembered that by the time president Museveni closed Universities, most of the students had already paid tuition to zero balance since they were approaching examinations period while others were about to complete them. Currently, Universities such as MUST started a new semester with online lectures which will close the academic year 2020/2021.
