The breaking of NSFAS
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) was meant to be a haven for underprivileged students. With a budget of R47.6 billion for 1.1 million students in 2023, there really should not be any issues.
Instead, NSFAS has followed the path of many other government-run institutions and offered little more than frustration. There are staggering irregular expenditure figures, constant leadership changes, and gaping holes in financial controls.
Students who met the R350 000 means test to get funding have found that the NSFAS accommodation allowance is capped at R45 000 a year and the food allowance at R13 100 per year.
This has left many of them in debt and, in many cases, starving. There are concerns that some NSFAS students might not be awarded their degree certificates at the end of the year, or if they are continuing their studies, they will not be able to register.
Add to this the recent axing of the NSFAS CEO Andile Nongogo amid a R47-billion payments scandal, while a Special Investigating Unit (SIU) investigation has revealed that nearly R5 billion was made in wrongful payments to students who didn't qualify for the grant.
In this week's Friday Briefing, we examine the breaking of NSFAS and why it matters.
News24's Bongekile Macupe covered education matters extensively before becoming News24's deputy politics editor. She reflects on the many times it has gone wrong at NSFAS since its inception.
We also have a submission from Dr Se n Mfundza Muller from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Johannesburg. He writes that a failure to fix NSFAS could result in the higher education system being constantly destabilised by a system that is supposed to support it.
Finally, Wits University's Dr Bernadette Johnson and University of Johannesburg's Professor Mondli Hlatshwayo provide possible solutions on what could work if NSFAS was to be done away with.
It is crucial that a solution is found because, ultimately, it is the students who are paying the price for this debacle.
Best,
Vanessa Banton
Opinions editor.
NSFAS is in a mess and needs more than rhetoric and talk to fix the rot
Bongekile Macupe argues that for as long as there are no intentional efforts to deal with the rot at NSFAS, we will still discuss the same issues in years to come.
NSFAS crisis reflects pattern of bad judgement from the state
Amid instability at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, it is hardly surprising that funds have been misallocated - both to institutions and to students, writes Se n Mfundza Muller.
The NSFAS mess is yet another self-fulfilling prophecy
The current NFSAS crisis is a symptom of an extremely corrupt public sector system that systematically steals from the public to advance the financial and economic interests of the corrupt elite running the state, write Bernadette Johnson and Mondli Hlatshwayo.
