• The SIU says that insufficient control of NSFAS funding criteria and mechanisms has led to 40 000 students being funded inappropriately at the cost of R5 billion.
• According to its investigations, NSFAS’s “weak” control systems led to the overpayment and underpayment of funds to different institutions since 2017.
• The SIU has also identified alleged “syndicates” involved with NSFAS’ student accommodation efforts.

South Africa’s anti-corruption task force, the special investigation unit (SIU) is currently investigating the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) over inappropriate funding given to students and insufficient control mechanisms when it comes to selecting which students are eligible to receive funding.

According to NSFAS’ own data, it has helped 38 million students since its inception 1991 and has issued more than R100 billion in funding since then. The government-run fund is incredibly popular in South Africa where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line. In February 2023, NSFAS said it selected 613 909 students to receive funding.

Today SA News reports that 40 000 of those students may have been funded incorrectly, costing taxpayers R5 billion, according to the SIU’s ongoing investigation into the matter.

SIU says that these students come from households that have an income of R350 000 or more, which would be against NSFAS’ own funding eligibility rules.

“These students did not submit their parents’ details upon application and therefore the means test was not properly conducted,” says the anti-corruption watchdog in a statement.

How did these students get funded by NSFAS then? According to the SIU’s investigation, NSFAS doesn’t have its own control mechanisms, most of which are handled digitally, in order.

“The SIU’s investigation shows that NSFAS failed to design and implement controls that would ensure that there is an annual reconciliation between the funds disbursed to the institutions and the funded list of registered students,” it said.

It adds that these weak control mechanisms, which oversee and organise billions of Rand and possibly the future of millions of people, have led to “overpayments and underpayments of funds to the different institutions for the period 2017 to date”.

The whole situation seems very shady, as the SIU says it has identified “different scenarios in terms of which students were funded because of overpayments, underpayments, unfunded students, double dipping and dropouts, and the involvement of syndicates in student accommodation.”

“All these implications are because the different governance levels and senior management staff did not fully discharge their duties in terms of all the different applicable legislation,” the SIU concludes.

Despite this, millions of South African youths are still unfunded, and continue to struggle against the NSFAS application mechanisms and appeals processes. You simply have to check comments on any of the NSFAS’ Twitter posts to find unhappy young people struggling to get their educations funded.

[Source – SA News]