LIKE THE LIMPING UPE & USE, THE PROPOSED FORMULA FOR THE EDUCATIONAL LOAN SCHEME WILL NOT MAKE IT SUSTAINABLE

What makes many of NRM’s policies outrageous is how they focus on one major thing, that is ‘how they can gain at a certain point but not sustainability.  This makes the regime to take the country on unsustainable ventures more over after wide publicity.  You cannot start a loan scheme in Uganda and say students get funds and pay after.  It simply does not make economic sense.  What Uganda needs is not copying what has been done elsewhere, but to originate what will work.

There are options to take by a student after H SC, and one of them is University Education.  It was cheap sponsoring a student in 1980 at Makerere because even a Nursery school teacher would comfortably do so. The pay made economic sense.  Today, it doesn’t that is why a serious Government would look for ways to bail out parents but thinking about sustainability.  Help a parent pay say shs 30,000 per month over a period of time because there is no guarantee that child will get work after University and if he got the work, a child would manage to pay back something when he is paid at least shs 500,000.  How many can get such jobs.  The reasons why our countries will remain backward and beggars is simply the myopic decisions made which have short term gains like in this case the 2011 elections.

I have since 2001 been an advocate for an Educational Loan Scheme but
never a non – sustainable one.

The American poet Robert Frost once said about the privilege of a higher education, that “Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard”.

A cynical view perhaps, but one no doubt shared by heaps of tertiary students, for while people prattle on about broadening horizons and intellectual challenges in under-graduate and post-graduate education, the fact is that the issues that really matter to students are simple ones – access and affordability – can they get in, and can they afford to stay there?

A non sustainable loan scheme which may die as soon as it is instituted as did the Entandiikwa is one reason we should get a serious Government come 2011.

William Kituuka Kiwanuka