• The SIU has formed an agreement with the Motheo TVET College in the Free State for it to pay NSFAS back R38 million.
• Motheo allegedly held on to the millions that were from unallocated NSFAS funding from as early as 2017.
• The TVET is now set to pay the money to NSFAS over a five year period.

The Motheo Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) College in the Free State has agreed to sign an Acknowledgement of Debt (AoD) agreement with the Special Investigation Unit (SIU).

This agreement will see the college pay R38 million back to NSFAS, the government’s student aid organisation. The money was supposed to be given to beneficiaries of NSFAS as part of their grant funding, but remained unallocated. The money was supposed to be returned at the end of the period, i.e. 2022.

According to a government statement, this whopping sum of taxpayer Rands didn’t go to students because certain students either changed institutions or deregistered. The funds have been held by Motheo since as early as 2017.

Now the TVET has agreed to pay back to money in monthly instalments for a period of five years. The first sum to be paid back will of R855 679.91.

The SIU – South Africa’s corruption-busting watchdog – has been recovering swindled NSFAS funds from institutions for some time now. Last year it recovered R33 million from Northlink College in the Western Cape.

In May, the University of Johannesburg agreed to pay NSFAS back an eye-watering R350 million in unallocated funds thanks to the SIU’s ongoing investigation.

In total R5 billion worth of unallocated NSFAS funding is sitting in the coffers of universities and TVET colleges since 2017. Since 1991 the scheme has issued over R100 billion to 38 million students.

NSFAS misplaced and mismanaged the R5 billion through what the SIU called “weak control mechanisms.”

These weak controls of billions of government-granted funds were squandered thanks to “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,” the SIU said in April.

So far the SIU has recovered R421.3 million from higher learning institutions. That means that there is still around R4.5 billion worth of missing NSFAS funding.

“The SIU encourages other institutions of higher learning to come forward and pay back unallocated funds due to NSFAS,” reads the statement. Institutions who do not may face legal consequences.