Loide Jason
Ongwediva-Hundreds of young people, who failed the Grade 10 and 12 national examinations, overnighted at the northern regional centres of the Namibian College of Open Learning (Namcol) in a bid to secure placement in the limited space available in Namcol classrooms.
Namcol is the last resort for many of the learners who failed their full-time examinations for Grade 10 and 12, as it offers learners a second chance to improve their grades in the subjects they failed.
However, the regional centres can only take so many learners for each subject in any given year.
To secure places, learners from various northern regions gathered at the Namcol northern centre in Ongwediva this past Sunday, where they camped overnight in the hope of being the first in the queue on Monday morning to register.
Namcol’s northern regional manager Tauno Shivute said Namcol would not have sufficient space for all learners who wished to enrol for subjects in Grade 10 and 12.
The space constraints result from the limited number of subject textbooks handed out to each learner at enrolment.
For now, the centre will only enrol 20 learners for each subject a day, until the centre runs out of books, which will mean the end of the enrolment period.
Learners who overnighted at the centre did not take this news well because it meant those who fell outside the cut-off point of 20 people for a subject a day would have to come back the next day.
“They know very well that the majority did not make it to university yet they are limiting the space. This is not good, they are shutting the door on our futures,” Manene Mokaxua complained.
“This is a way of sending us to the streets. We want to improve our results in order to gain admission to tertiary institutions but they are limiting us. This is very bad,” Lidya Shaahamange added.