By Umaru Fofana
Dozens of Sierra Leonean graduate students are said to be living under extremely reduced circumstances in China leaving in doubt the successful completion of their programmes.
The President of the Sierra Leone Students’ Union in the Asian country has written to Politico to complain about the plight of more than thirty of his colleagues said to be struggling to feed and meet other financial commitments as they pursue their courses.
According to the union president, Edson Kamara, those affected are beneficiaries of the Sierra Leone Government grant-in-aid 2019, but have not received their allowances for last year since their home government “made the disbursements to the Sierra Leone embassy in Beijing”.
A statement issued by the mission in Beijing on 1 February 2020 had said that the disbursement for 2019 would start on 3 February 2020 following a memorandum of understanding between the Freetown Government and the Chinese Scholarship Council in Beijing.
Under the terms of the scholarship provided by the Chinese government to foreign students the beneficiary country is required to pay for their citizens their city residence rate, annual medical, books, among other things. So the home government is expected to be sending allowances to ease the financial burden on their students.
In the embassy’s press release, 131 students are said to be beneficiaries of the 2019 grants. “As of today, we have a list of over thirty of the beneficiaries who are yet to receive theirs”, Kamara told Politico.
“The students are listed and have presented their documents to the Embassy as the process demands” but are yet to be paid, he said, adding that this was the first time such a problem had manifested since he’d been there.
“We extensively engaged the Embassy on the anomaly and a clear explanation wasn’t given to us as to why the over 30 students were left out” Kamara went on.
He said they had contacted the Student Secretary in Beijing who “directed us to the Ministry of Tertiary and Higher Education saying only they could authorize the payments of the remaining beneficiaries”. But he went on: “To our surprise, the officials of the Ministry…said they were unaware of a disrupted payment process and intimated that they thought the process had long concluded”.
Kamara said he formally wrote to the Permanent Secretary at the ministry about the matter who wrote to the Embassy in Beijing but that the matter had still not been resolved.
He said the situation was particularly dire for the affected students at present because of the Covid19 pandemic. “At this point in time when there are still lockdowns in most universities in china and other students that travelled when the outbreak started, the condition of our colleagues is particularly precarious” the union president said.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Tertiary and Higher Education, Gilbert Cooper said they had sent allowances for all the students through the embassy in Beijing.
He said the embassy however informed them that some of the money had been paid back to the treasury apparently because they were not claimed. He said that as a matter of urgency they would work with the embassy, the finance ministry and all parties involved to ensure the students were paid their allowances.
Efforts to get the ambassador to China did not yield dividend.
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