Students cry foul play

Former students of Eskills Development Agency in Tongaat claim the college’s principal, Kamal Timmal is swindling them out of their stipend.

The stipend is a monthly allowance paid by government to people taking part in learnerships.

Eskills is one of the institutions that runs government learnership programmes funded through Fibre Processing and Manufacturing, Sector Education and Training Authority (FP&M Seta).

The 17 students who enrolled for the carpentry learnership said according to their agreement with Eskills they were supposed to receive a R960 monthly allowance.

“The problem started in December when Timmal only paid us R760 and when we questioned him he said he did not know he was supposed to pay us in full because the college was closed for holidays,” said Pinky Khanyile.

She said Timmal eventually paid them the rest of the money when they threatened to report him to FP&Seta.

The students claim that their allowances were illegally deducted when they were late for class or missed a lesson. However Timmal has denied all the allegations and said everything he was doing was in line with FP&Seta regulations.

The dispute is also over the premises for class and the facilitator who left the college in February, leaving the students without a teacher.

Timmal told the Courier that his previous landlord had wanted a 100% rent increase and the funding he receives from FP&M Seta does not cover that.

“I am looking for new premises because the students said they did not want to use the garage, even though it is big enough to accommodate all of them,” said Timmal.

Last week the students went to the FP&M Seta provincial office in Pinetown to ask for Timmal to be investigated. One of the issues raised was the termination of their learnership which was advertised in community newspapers without them being informed.

“We think he is closing the learnership as a way of getting rid of us. Now we want FP&M Seta to tell us what is really going on,” said Charity Bonga.

“He said he could not afford to pay rent for the premises and when we asked him if FP&M Seta was not paying him to run the learnership he told us everything was coming out of his pocket,” said Blessing Kubheka.

Timmal told the Courier he was reviewing his decision to terminate the learnership and was trying to get everything sorted out before informing the students of the new developments.

FP&M Seta marketing and communications manager, Elmine Baumann said they needed time to investigate the students allegations before they could comment.