South African student aid scheme ‘not sustainable’

South Africa’s student support scheme needs “decisive leadership” and more “transparent processes” to regain the trust of the sector, academics have said, after it was plunged into administration for a second time in less than a decade. 

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), which provides billions of rands to the country’s least-well off students to help with living costs and tuition fees, has been beset with financial and governance problems.

Earlier this month Buti Manamela, the higher education and training minister, announced he has appointed an administrator again after attempts to stabilise the organisation using ordinary mechanisms failed. The NSFAS was last put into administration in 2018.

Manamela cited weaknesses in the organisation’s management and IT system as well as unresolved student appeals and failures in student accommodation oversight as the reasons behind the action.

Students have complained they have received late or no payments from the funding body, an issue which contributed to the student riots seen throughout the country last year.

Politicians and academics have questioned the future of the scheme, with the chair of Universities South Africa, Francis Petersen, recently telling Times Higher Education that student violence at South African universities would persist without reforms to its funding model.

Linda du Plessis, senior deputy vice-chancellor of the North-West University said that while she had not lost faith in the scheme overall, “the current model on which NSFAS is based is not sustainable”.

She added that governance has “lapsed” at the crisis-hit institution, and that “evidence of mismanagement and corruption has been under scrutiny for a long time”.

du Plessis said that NSFAS’s remit has expanded rapidly in recent years, with its funding doubling from roughly R27 billion in 2019, to more than R54 billion in 2024, despite warnings it was expanding too quickly.

"A revised framework based on evidence, decisive leadership, careful implementation, collaboration with key stakeholders, transparent processes are all steps that should be taken to establish a sustainable student support funding model,” she said.

“NSFAS should work closer with universities to enable them to work collaboratively to also steer the enrolment plan of universities towards the critical scarce skills programmes.”

Pedro Mzileni, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zululand in South Africa, who has previously written about the limitations of NSFAS, noted that reforms in 2018 saw it transform from a “loan system to a grant system, administered in the wholesale by a board assisted by a limited staff, who were responsible for the distribution of billions of rands to all funded students across the sector”.

“The auditor general in 2024 flagged this approach as a high risk, mainly raising questions of incapacity at NSFAS, inadequate oversight, and the lack of technologies required to track transactions to avoid fraud and waste,” he said.

He noted that NSFAS has played an important role in expanding higher education access to black students in South Africa, and insisted that it needed greater funding and support to reach its potential. 

However, the South African Union of Students (SAUS) has questioned what putting NSFAS under administration will achieve, arguing it forms part of a repeated cycle of leadership failures.

Speaking to local media, Thato Masekoa, spokesperson of the SAUS, said that placing the organisation under administration is not “a sustainable or effective solution to these challenges”. 

“Historical experience has shown that repeated administrative interventions have not resulted in long-term stability, but have instead contributed to cycles of uncertainty, leadership disruptions, and policy inconsistency,” he said.

NSFAS was approached for comment.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com