Perfecting a student loan payment system

Mr Editor, I will be most grateful if you can please place this in your letters section of your esteemed publication. Jerry Muadinohamba, last week during his farewell lecture, mentioned something that wedged my mind. It was a brute honest simple and dignifying open chest candid statement of “just do it”. This mantra, Muadinohamba says was the core of his ten year leadership of the Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) Fund. I was bitter when watching the news on Wednesday evening that a group of students at the Polytechnic held an impromptu demonstration highlighting their plight to their leaders about unpaid student loans. The unpaid loans then meant that students aren’t allowed to registered or access their student data. Ostensibly the Namibian Student Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF) - for reasons whether they bee technical, legal and administrative - could not pay on time. This has been the song of the NSFAF over the years. I was a student ten years ago. By now one would have hoped that they have perfected the system of paying out loans, but it appears not to be the case. Even more upsetting is the action that the Polytechnic and the University of Namibia (Unam) takes whenever this happens. Their first port of call is to punish students at the expense of the inept administration of the NSFAF, who does not make payment sooner. It is not the students fault and they should not be made to feel the brunt of this malaise. The NSFAF, Unam and Polytechnic share at symbiotic relationship with the Ministry of Education - the line ministry they all report to. I fail to understand why the NSFAF, Unam and Polytechnic do not utilise their channels in their normal day-to-day communication to oversee the task of payments, loan queries and acknowledgement letters as a tripartite arrangement - as opposed to the poor students, who run like wandering antelopes between these service providers for something as menial as an acknowledgement letter. Nothing is more stressing for a student than having to spend his last cents on taxi fares and commuting between the largeness of this economically expensive city. Like Muadinohamba said, lessen the transactional cost for students and relieve them of this unnecessary burden. The operational benefits will be colossal. The NSFAF, as part of its customer relations management, will have the luxury of only dealing with Unam and Polytechnic through a dedicated standalone service vendor, as opposed to have 7 000 student annually cluttering their offices for enquiries at the start of each academic year. In return the two institutions will then be guaranteed a turnkey solution of a payment turnaround time that is way quicker than the current norm, as the funds will reflect in their accounts sooner, and as such, are guaranteed funding for the opening semesters’ activities well ahead of the academic year. Couple this with forward planning and controls and soon you will have perfected the system. Nothing is preventing these three entities from cooperating. It is simply a matter of will and a conscious decision to do things differently, as Muadinohamba stated. Just do it. To borrow his words as my departure, it is an abomination that we have not done this already. After all, it is taxpayer’s money and no parent wants to see his child go through the uncertainty of not knowing whether he will get funds or not. We know that is not a right, but a privilege. However, a privilege nonetheless that can be managed better.