Bail Out Nursing Students!

Events that have surrounded the admission of students into their respective Christian Health Association of Malawi (CHAM) nursing colleges and Malawi College of Health Sciences are deplorable, disheartening, and at worst bloodcurdling.
As a background, it all started when the media broke the news that the government was no longer interested in funding the training of these students in Malawi. No sooner did these reports fly, than we heard that these institutions had hiked their fees from K210, 000 to K310, 000 per year. What this meant was that each student was mandated to dig deeper into their pockets for one to be admitted into these institutions. Then the directive was extended to those studying various health courses at the state-run Malawi College of Health Sciences. The result? We gather, only 15 per cent of these students have managed to pay the minimum installment for the first term. But this is not all, for this decision has far-reaching ramifications for this country.
For a country like Malawi, grappling amidst many development challenges, many of them in the health sector, one cannot help but offer a clarion call for the reversal of this back peddling decision by government. For instance, diseases such as Tuberculosis, Malaria, and HIV/AIDS are still decimating a lot of Malawian lives. The HIV prevalence rate, we are told, is hovering somewhere around 12 per cent, Malaria claims many a Malawian child life a day and maternal mortality rate is still in skyscraping percentage. Surely, these nurses are much needed in our hospitals and the training of one nurse can go a long way in reducing some of these challenges that have dogged the health statuses of many Malawians.
Of even more laughable to note is the fact that Malawi has already an acute shortage of health personnel. Doctors, we hear, time and again migrate to western countries for greener pastures after they have graduated from our single training institution for doctors—the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine which has a single campus in Blantyre. Nurses, as far as migration to foreign countries is concerned, have not been spared either.
I surely find the argument that government does not have monies in its coffers to fund these students not to be plausible. One might be tempted to wonder: why of all cost-cutting measures could government decide to cease the training of nurses from these institutions?
One Godfrey Kamanya, Member of Parliament for Lilongwe Msozi North, sent me in stitches when he reasoned with government to find monies of funding these students by putting levies on fuel, beer and cigarettes. Surely, Kamanya wanted to sympathize with these students—and it is in order. But, I strongly feel that putting more levies on products like beer and cigarettes let alone on fuel might not be the best solution. One does not need to be an economist to know that by putting a levy on fuel, it will obviously lead to the escalation of prices for many products and services. Furthermore, as already argued by a certain writer that Malawians are already overtaxed and putting more levies on Malawians will be like straining their pockets.
The government needs to find other means of sourcing money for the training of these students other than putting more taxes on Malawians. For instance, the government might source the monies by asking for donors to intervene in this predicament. I think it is not in order to execute desperate measures of sourcing money when as a country; we haven’t even exhausted all the means of solving this problem.
Malawians who also evade the already existing taxes that the government put in place should also know that the taxes that they run away from go a long way in helping government execute various functions and responsibilities. This, being a case in point. The government has for a long time bemoaned the tendency of some people who evade tax by thinking that the government is overburdening them. This surely has to stop.
However, when all is said and done, impoverished CHAM and MCHS students need to go back to school and the government needs to play a leading role in ensuring that they are back to their respective school premises.