The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education is complaining about the number of rotten potatoes sold by school vendors, which it says has created a negative image of people who make a living by selling in schools.
The spokesperson of the department, Mr. Muzi Mahlambi, said that they are very concerned about the negative incidents in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal where they have received negative reports of shocking things allegedly done by people selling to students.
He was speaking after an incident that shocked many people that happened at Menzi High in Mlaza where it turned out that there was a man who was selling outside the school who got into a frenzy and stabbed three students and one died and two were taken to the hospital. The incident happened last night.
It turns out that a vendor who is a member of the community was accusing one of the students of selling things to his colleagues inside the school premises.
”So you see how bad this thing is. The person in question here is a member of the community that we should all trust, but he simply chose to take his soul out so easily,” he explained.
Continuing, he said that it is surprising what kind of person this is who says he is going to sell to students but is also armed with a knife on his hip.
He said that what worries them the most as the Ministry of Education is that there are other negative incidents that have been reported to have been committed by people selling in schools.
”We sometimes find out that there are sellers in schools, who sell cakes and put marijuana in them. So tell me what you can say about something like that. After all, the truth is that we allow people to sell because we sympathize with the community and understand the plight of unemployment,” Mahlambi said.
He said that in some schools they have also found that some are selling sweets mixed with other wrong things.
Others, he said, have been told that they end up selling mysterious absorbents to students, all of which he said makes them frown upon people who sell to students in schools.
However, he said that only a few of these are rotten potatoes, but he complained that he does not know what they can do to remove those potatoes so that the others do not rot.
He said the problem they are facing as a department is that they can’t just sleep and wake up and talk about the fact that all the people who sell to students are fired.
That, he said, was a decision that would not be easy for them to take just like that. He said that we can harm others who do this work with the intention of supporting their families.
“It is not an easy decision that you can just take lightly and end up like that. The truth is that there are many people who support their families by selling in schools and have worked in this job for many years and they do it with great reliability,” he explained.
He emphasized that they wish but that there is a solution that will lead to avoiding the problems that end up putting the future of students at risk.