Dear Editor
The DA welcomes the decision by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, to stop sharing personal information of parents and guardians with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) without their consent.
This after NSFAS allegedly discriminated against students with information obtained from SARS without the written consent from their parents. This action breached both the memorandum of understanding between NSFAS and SARS, as well as the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
It is shameful that President Cyril Ramaphosa has not taken a single action against Higher Education Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande, given this latest scandal. The DA will request that an urgent investigation be launched into the Minister’s role and knowledge of this gross abuse, as well as the various dodgy tenders of NSFAS direct payment to service providers, accommodation service providers, accommodation accreditation agents, and the alleged kickbacks to – the Minister, the South African Communist Party (SACP), and NSFAS Chairperson, Ernest Khosa.
Every year, the DA is inundated with single and divorced parents and guardians whose children’s NSFAS applications and appeals are rejected due to the estranged other parent’s income breaching the assistance level.
NSFAS’ actions have denied worthy students of the funding needed to lift them out of poverty and denied them the reasonable chance to appeal this rejection, all while potentially traumatising students with tragic family histories.
Last year, 2 million students applied for NSFAS funding. Almost half of them were rejected – many due to SARS’ confirmation of parent income threshold, which we now know were unscrupulously obtained.
While Minister Nzimande often toots his own horn, the truth is in the pudding.
The Minister has not been a good and moral steward of taxpayer’s money. Instead, he has helmed a Department that willfully failed in its mandate to serve South Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable students.
Despite the Minister’s many press conferences this year already, he has yet to inform the public on how the R1.1 billion shortfall will be funded or why the NSFAS application process have been extended considering that 87 000 students might not be funded and the fact that 11 000 students have not received their 2023 funding.
It is time the President replaced Minister Nzimande with a competent Minister that will have the best interest of students at heart. Unfortunately, he would have to search outside the Tripartite Alliance.
Regards
Chantel King MP
DA Shadow Minister of Higher Education
sherm
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Cross Thread
If three out of five people are suffering from diarrhoea, are the others enjoying it?