Polytechnic reopens, calls for help
Management of the Malawi Polytechnic has called on well-wishers to come in and support 268 students whose belongings were burnt in a fire accident that razed down one of its hostels on November 26 last year.
The college has issued a press release informing students that school will be reopened on January 20 2020.
The authorities say the decision has been made following financial assistance from the government through the Department of Disaster Management Affairs which is expected to assist in “alleviating accommodation issues” for the affected students.
“However, realising that affected students still need support, well-wishers are still encouraged to support them in any form through the office of the Dean of Students,” reads part of the press statement.
Meanwhile, the school’s Dean of Students, Luciano Ndalama, has told The Daily Times that the students need support to recover what they lost in the inferno.
He says among other items, students lost laptops, clothes and beddings.
“The assistance that we have got currently is to do with accommodation, but still there are some who have challenges to get the things that they lost,” Ndalama said.
The followed hot on the heels of running battles between police and the college’s first year students who were protesting what they called lapse of security at their hostels.
On the day of the fire accident, police were firing teargas in an effort to disperse the protesting students who had blocked Masauko Chipembere Highway.
The cause of the fire is not yet known, but some students blame it on the police’s teargas canisters that were being thrown at the school’s campus.
Mathews Kasanda is a journalist who holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from University of Malawi (The Polytechnic).
In 2015, Media Institute of Southern Africa awarded him the Best Print Media Education Journalist of the Year accolade.
He joined Times Group Newsroom in September 2019.
