BY MULOTWA MULOTWA
Look, the Poly Dean fiasco is merely a tip of the iceberg. The problems are deep for higher education in Malawi. Worse for a girl child.
Life is hard for a University student, especially females. Let us go back to Cafeterias [ replete with coupons], travel concession tickets [ Shirebus lines model as was in the past], build more hostels [to kill self boarding & the begging Dean of Students for available bed space] – in an effort to put the aforementioned necessities in place girls are taken advantage of.
Our students & a fault of culture & poverty cannot look after themselves in the manner theory suggests. One has to cook for themselves, walk long distances to class from some distant shanty location in the name of self boarding.
Worse still go to class & find no chairs in the lecture rooms. The way University students jostle for chairs, is a sorry sight. These 16 year olds you are sending to Universities are not sophisticated enough to withstand all those pressures.
Take some time to visit a female hostel or boarding house, see how rooms have become chimneys, one end of the study table is a red hot coil [ lonely cooking plate] sitting on 2 bricks, boiling beans & on the other end are text books.
The electrification & naked wires in the rooms are a time bomb. It is hot. The girls can’t wait to spend a weekend away at a lodge in an aircon, with the same men who made terrible decisions on higher education. Benefiting from their own wrong doing. While we applaud & borrow for “The Interchange” which could’ve waited, our unsuspecting daughters have become sex toys for Deans & sugar daddies.
