At least 1000 students drop out of the Tanzanian tertiary institution, Makerere University, and the reason is nothing short of concerning. According to the university’s vice-chancellor, the culprit responsible for this dent in the country’s educational system is gambling. Students with gambling problems have turned to their tuition fees to fund their betting habits.
A report by the Tanzanian newspaper, The Citizen revealed that every year 1000 students drop out of Makerere University after losing their tuition fees to gambling.
This information was disclosed by the school’s vice chancellor Prof Barnabas Nawangwe on Tuesday during the award ceremony of the College of Business and Management Sciences (CoBAMS). He noted that sports betting has become a distressing deterrent in Tanzania’s literacy development.
The professor revealed that research conducted on school dropouts after they failed to pay their tuition fees, brought about interesting findings.
“Our investigation have shown that actually, those people were dropping out not because they failed to pay fees. They got fees from their parents and wanted to invest it in betting in order to get interest,” the professor relayed.
He also said that these students somehow manage to delude their parents by masquerading as graduates during graduation day, despite not being registered as official students.
“They ended up being broke and kept telling their parents stories, and parents don’t hear their names being read in the graduation booklet,” he added.
A rather interesting case relating to this issue unfolded in May 2023, when a student, Augustine Ssekajugo faked his kidnap and cut off communication with his parents after he had gambled away his school fees. He left his dorm and hid out in an entirely different district.
His plan was later revealed after the police found him hiding in a remote village, following an intense search, and a subsequent arrest.
The Vice-Chancellor used the opportunity to warn other students looking to attempt such charades to abstain from them. He also told students to stop gallivanting the streets of Kampala under the guise of being unemployed, but instead, go provide skilled labor in other regions of the globe.
“The good thing is that the population of the rest of the world is going down. It is only in Africa where the population is going up. With the decrease in the population, there are many countries now where there is a big deficit of skilled workforce,” the professor said.
