Conflict over money between East Cape Midlands College (EMC) and landlords who provide accommodation costs to its students is boiling over again.
Conflict over money between East Cape Midlands College (EMC) and landlords who provide accommodation costs to its students is boiling over again.
Landlords claim that the college has refused to pay for accommodation of some of its students, while the EMC claims that all payments owing are up to date.
Secretary of a landlords committee, Zukiswa Gora, said she accommodated eight students in 2013, but was only paid for two.
"This will take some time to resolve because the school is distancing itself from any obligations," she said.
Meanwhile, EMC campus manager, Queeny Xulubana, said that the college's finance office had already settled all relevant claims submitted by landlords.
“I haven't received any complaints. It is foreign to me that landlords are not paid because according to my understanding everyone was paid according to the submission of their claim forms,” she said.
“We must also be careful with the issue of landlords who accept students without the consent of the school because we allocate one landlord to a student and if the student moves out to make other arrangements with different landlords, we end up in a situation were there are two landlords claiming for the same student. We will pay the claim to the original landlord to whom we first allocated the student," Xulubana said.
She said students had been warned not to "go looking for a place without consulting the school because we have a database of landlords who meet the standard of accommodating our students".
As a result, some landlords who claimed accommodation costs were not on the EMC database, Xulubana said.
But, landlord Lungile Mxube said college representatives had evaluated and approved his accommodation offer.
He claimed the original Memorandum of Understanding between EMC and the landlords stated the college would pay the landlords, but that the college had later reneged on this agreeing by saying that students were responsible for the payments.
Students like Sinethemba Mbulawa have ended up paying for their own accommodation. "I had to pay for my residence because I got covered for tuition and they said we must deal with the accommodation ourselves."
Meanwhile, Mxube said he wanted Blade Nzimande to "come and resolve this matter himself".
"He can't have time to fly from Johannesburg to KZN and not have time to come and look at the critical issues we are facing here.
"Grahamstown is dry and our businesses need to move hence we accommodate the students," he said. "But we need to work with the school for this to happen."
A landlords committee meeting on the 13th of January resolved that the school would be given until the end of January to pay the fees.
They decided that if the EMC did not pay in time, the students already allocated accommodation for 2014 would be evicted.
A lawyer at the meeting said he was dealing with the matter and collected the names of students whose accommodation costs had not been paid.
