Parliament grills NSFAS over student funding failures

On Wednesday, the National Student Financial Aid Scheme briefed Parliament’s portfolio committee for higher education.

• On Wednesday the beleaguered National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) briefed Parliament on its modern direct payment scheme and various issues around the scheme.
• NSFAS was criticised by the portfolio committee for higher education for its ongoing inadequacies.
• NSFAS admitted that its modern funding scheme had issues.
• Parliament gave NSFAS a two-week deadline to present a position on how it will fix the issues raised in the meeting.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) was grilled in Parliament on Wednesday by the portfolio committee for higher education over its ongoing failures on the payment of student allowances. NSFAS was briefing the committee on its disbursement of allowances to students, the roll-out of its recent direct-payment scheme, and its query scheme.

Chair of the committee Nompendulo Mkhatshwa (ANC) opened the meeting with harsh words for the funding scheme. “This entity, with the mandate it has, should be the best dash entity in the country … but accurate now it is not. It’s an embarrassment.”

Last month, NSFAS announced that its CEO Andile Nongogo had taken “a leave of absence” while the board investigated allegations against him related to his conduct in awarding bids at NSFAS.

According to the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA), NSFAS hired businesses without banking licence registrations to handle direct payment to students, and these businesses charged much higher rates than commercial banks. OUTA started exposing the irregularities as early as September 2022.

“I want to emphasise this point: in our books, he (Nongogo) has not been found guilty of anything,” said NSFAS chair Ernest Khosa.

“We are conscious of all the challenges NSFAS is facing. We gain seen the protests and read articles in the media. We acquire constantly received instructions from our shareholders for greater accountability.”

He said, the fund had disbursed R32-billion to universities and TVET colleges. Its annual budget is “just under” R50-billion.

NSFAS acting chief operations officer Vuyokazi Mafilika said the fund had received 170,683 financial and academic appeals from first-time and returning students who were defunded or rejected. Of these, 58,924 students were funded again; 6,337 applicants were rejected; 28,971 were “deemed invalid” because of withdrawn, deleted and duplicated appeals.

A further 44,561 appeals are dependent on institutions to load academic results and on applicants to upload missing information; the remaining 31,890 are “in progress”.

Mafilika said for next year’s application process “NSFAS will catch 72 hours to manufacture funding decisions for all students”. It also plans to digitise the application process so that “there will no longer be manual applications”.

But parliamentary members were sceptical of NSFAS’s ambitious plans.

Karabo Khakhau (DA) said NSFAS needed to be reminded that the majority of the students they fund are poor. “Students live in communities where they don’t even gain access to cell phones. They depend on those manual application systems.”

“I’m struggling to understand how you are suddenly going to maintain the capacity to gain a 72-hour turnaround response time to students … You’re already struggling with everything factual now, so where finish you acquire the confidence to consider that you maintain the capacity to finish this in 2024?” asked Khakhau.

Mandla Shikwambana (EFF) said at least 1,300 students at Free State University still haven’t received their allowances since March.

“Students fade to universities to study. You don’t pay their accommodation, food or transport. Then they fail and secure defunded. Can you please try to be human beings? Our kids are struggling on the ground.”

Walter Letsie (ANC) said, “Your contact centre should be called an uncontactable centre. That division is doing nothing to assist students. They are sometimes waiting up to two hours on the line.”

He said the committee had met five times with NSFAS this year about the same issues.

“It’s September, but you’re telling us that you maintain 44,000 appeals that depend on the institution and missing documents. From February to now, where are these kids getting food from?” he asked.

NSFAS acting CEO Masile Ramorwesi said the fund had received 2.1-million applications from first-time and recurring applicants. Of these 24% were rejected; 2.4% withdrawn; 62% accepted; and 11.6% pending, largely due to missing information from students, third parties, or institutions.

Ramorwesi said 45,927 students were disqualified for submitting falsified or fraudulent documents. He confirmed that after NSFAS re-evaluated the applications, 14,703 applications were reinstated, while 31,224 remained disqualified. The main acumen for disqualification was that most first-time entering students had a household income of more than R350,000, while returning students either did not meet the required academic progression – which is 50% of all registered modules – or exceeded the minimum number of years allocated to achieve the qualification.

Ramorwesi admitted the modern payment scheme had caused issues, but said “any modern scheme in its year of first implementation experiences challenges”.

Ramorwesi said NSFAS plans to resolve all internal appeals by 30 September. Appeals that are dependent on the student or institution will be resolved by 30 October.

The committee gave NSFAS a two-week deadline to present a region for how it will resolve the issues raised in the meeting.

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