NSFAS: here we go again
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has just one job: to cover the tuition fees and living expenses of more than 1.1-million students at universities and technical and vocational education training colleges.
This is not an impossible task; the department of public service & administration pays millions of civil servants on time every month, and countless governments in other countries have implemented student financing mechanisms that work.
Yet NSFAS appears incapable of ensuring students from some of SA’s poorest households can focus on their academic assignments without worrying about where they will sleep or where their next meal is going to come from. Time and again students have been left high and dry because they have not received their NSFAS allowances on time, and this year is no different.
Students have held protests at the delays in receiving their dues, and NSFAS is again pointing fingers at service providers and higher education institutions, refusing to shoulder the blame for this dismal state of affairs. There is thus an argument to be made for putting NSFAS under administration, as higher education & innovation minister Blade Nzimande did last week. The expectation is that a strong administrator will fix the rot and ensure money flows where it should.
The trouble is we have been here before. In 2018, then higher education & training minister Naledi Pandor placed NSFAS under administration in the wake of delays in disbursing funds and appointed former Sars executive Randall Carolissen administrator. When he wrapped up his tenure in 2020, NSFAS was given a clean audit by the auditor-general. But within an astonishingly short space of time the organisation descended once more into chaos: it received a qualified audit with adverse findings in 2021/22, and its 2022/23 audit has yet to be finalised.
NSFAS is mired in a corruption scandal after the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) alleged that former board chair Ernest Khosa and Nzimande received kickbacks from service providers appointed to disburse funds to eligible students. These service providers did such a shoddy job the now dissolved NSFAS board commissioned an investigation by law firm Werksmans, which found they had been irregularly appointed and recommended their contracts be terminated. Eight months later, those companies are still doing business with NSFAS.
Nzimande’s decision to place NSFAS under administration is potentially a means to right the troubled ship. The trouble is Outa has placed the minister in the heart of the alleged corruption.
The timing of Nzimande’s action, just weeks before voters go to the ballot boxes, raises questions about whether he truly has the best interests of students at heart, or whether he is motivated instead by a desire to woo their votes and deflect attention from the corruption allegations levelled against him.