The UWP has urged education minister Octavia Alfred to resign from her position for allegedly telling Dominican students to engage in prostitution to further their studies. The major opposition party accused the education minister of making the statement while meeting with students in Marigot on March 10.
According to the UWP, Minister Alfred told students while addressing scholarship application and educational opportunities that the government will cover the tuition and living expenses of students on scholarship for one year while they must sell their bodies to see themselves through school for the second year.
“Everybody looking as if is a scholarship they have,” the UWP quoted Alfred as saying. “But if your letter says you going on a two year program…the letter says the government will cover your tuition and your household and living expenses for one year you have to shake up your pampalam and look for year two.”
The UWP went on to allege that Alfred’s purported statement to the youths “has been widely understood to mean that they must use their private parts in sexual encounters to secure additional money for tuition, housing and living expenses that government is unwilling or unable to provide.”
The opposition said the minister’s conduct is “disgraceful, reprehensible, absolutely intolerable and totally unbecoming of a Member of Parliament and Minister of Government” and that it was an outrageous insult to the students who had to sit through the meeting to hear her talk. The UWP tasked Alfred to do the “only honourable thing” and resign from office or to risk getting removed by the head of cabinet in order to salvage the integrity of her office.
The minister of education is yet to respond to these allegations and the DLP administration has not addressed the issue, but the opposition seems bent to play up the allegation and get the minister out of office.
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