Public address by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) Administrator, Prof Hlengani Mathebula, at the Ministerial Ninety-Day Submission of the Stabilisation Plan
My appointment was an incomparable honour. I want to state my profound gratitude to you Honourable Minister, for having entrusted me with this momentous duty to serve those who emerged from our country’s egregious social injustice.
No national duty can match serving the young people who carry the hopes and dreams of their families and communities.
This is a historic opportunity that surpasses a typical job. With your support, we are practically laying the national foundation for the future of our nation.
Minister, I am fully invested in the task ahead.
What’s NSFAS’s reason for existence?
Our founders didn’t create NSFAS to enable illicit personal enrichment. Nor did they create it so that it would become a monument for institutional fracture, incompetence, and irrational decision-making.
Instead, it was founded to address constitutionally envisaged disadvantages to create a stepping stone out of the dungeon of social imbalances.
That’s why we not only support financially disadvantaged students, but students living with disabilities as well.
The cornerstone is losing its vitality
NSFAS’s value is fast evaporating under the weight of systemic weaknesses; in their wake millions of students are left frustrated, excluded and hopeless.
Who would have thought that there would be calls for the scheme’s dissolution today?
Yet, these calls are not unexpected given the institutional weaknesses that have been allowed to persist over an extended period of time.
Organisations exist when the society permits them by giving them the proverbial licence to operate.
When we started, our preconceptions from your gazette to media coverage were sadly confirmed.
We have found an organisation in a parlous stage of misgovernance, operational failures, and lowest employee morale.Our executive actions have provoked instant fight-back from those whose interest is being threatened – they desire a chaotic entity that’s easily looted.
This fightback is cloaked in righteous media sources when the agenda is patently evident, to divert the resources earmarked for our students to their own pockets.
It is also unfortunate that every qualified and capable black professional is held to different standards. Barely two months into the role, the scepticism about my values, competence, and capabilities dominated the media.
It happened at Eskom, Prasa, and every entity that requires sound expertise. The narrative being built is that we are not committed to the country, to sound governance, and to changing the future of our children.
Good governance protects dwindling resources
President Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa’s intervention via The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) was an apt acknowledgement of NSFAS’s governance failures.
Our organisation’s supply chain management doesn’t consistently follow benchmarked processes and procedures which create compliance and procurement risks.
This is no minor weakness for an organisation that disburses billions to more than 800 000 students, 50 TVET colleges, and 26 universities annually.
The scheme has 66 major audit findings with a disclaimer audit opinion from the Auditor-General and 115 overdue internal audit findings, respectively.
Now, Minister, if this doesn’t awaken urgency, we’ve already ignored the warning signs.
The archaic IT system contradicts the desired value proposition
Let’s examine our service value chain and institutional student support touchpoints.
To all intents and purposes, NSFAS has only four service stages, including cycle preparation, funding eligibility, confirmation of funding, and payment.
These stages are essentially what we need to master as a scheme to heighten our service levels to inspire renewed public confidence. But each of these four service stages requires a fit-for-purpose IT system to ensure efficiency and reliability.
Like when you use your bank card, our system must always work ecosystemically and seamlessly.
Unfortunately, the fragmentation of our IT system produces inestimable frustrations for our students and institutions.
What aggravates matters is the fact that we are servicing a tech-savvy generation who prefers prompt interactions and solutions.
Our ICT systems are not properly integrated to support the business processes, resulting in serious inefficiencies, affecting students’ academic journeys, and, resultantly, their future. The lack of integrated systems restricts the accuracy and reliability of data used for decision-making and reporting.
Interwoven ecosystems the future of optimal service delivery
NSFAS operates within a complex, highly interdependent ecosystem involving government departments, financial institutions, institutions of higher learning, and other service providers.
At the core of our operations is the inescapable need to collect, verify, process, and exchange large volumes of data to support student funding decisions, disbursement, payments, and reporting obligations.
NSFAS relies on critical integrations with external entities such as the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), Department of Home Affairs (DHA), the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA), the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Credit Bureaus, Universities, TVET colleges, banking institutions, accommodation service providers, and many others.
These integrations are vital in executing checks during the application for funding, assessing financial and academic eligibility of applicants and students, verifying academic registration and progression, processing payments to institutions, students, service providers, and producing statutory and operational reports.
Honourable Minister and distinguished guests, the reduction of NSFAS’s operating budget from R600 million to R300 million has had a profound institutional impact.
Routine operational activities, such as filling key vacancies, have become impossible.
Enumerated risks thrive unabated
We are facing a materially high-risk operating environment.
Our organisation has been assessed as RED until there is evidence that immediate stabilisation actions are working, especially in payment reliability, appeals reduction, audit action closure, data-quality improvement, and stakeholder communication.
Consequently, NSFAS remains materially exposed across audit compliance, data integrity, systems capability, appeals processing, accommodation management, stakeholder confidence, and transition execution.
Our risks are interdependent and directly affect operational continuity, payment reliability, statutory reporting, and student welfare.
These risks provide the basis for the stabilisation plan which is therefore not a parallel exercise.
Instead, it is the direct response to governance, systems, data, student-support, and stakeholder weaknesses identified during the first ninety days.
The stabilisation plan: From systemic risk to recovery
We are well on our path to creating the required stability and specific work has already been done.
We have created a governance structure with five workstreams that organise the priority actions needed to stabilise the scheme and restore confidence.
The stabilisation approach will be practical, sequenced, and evidence-based, distinguishing among immediate containment actions, diagnostic work, remedial implementation, monitoring, escalation, and transition to ordinary governance.
- Governance, audit, and consequence management. We are closing material audit findings as a matter of urgency, strengthening oversight structures and applying consequence management fairly, consistently and evidentially.
- ICT, data integrity and analytics. We are prioritising ICT integration and data analytics measures that improve funding accuracy, payment reliability, fraud prevention, audit readiness, student service and institutional coordination.
- Student support, appeals and fair access. We are giving precedence to appeals backlog clearance based on student impact, registration urgency, funding consequences, documentation readiness and the risk of unfair exclusion.
- TVET colleges, reconciliation and accommodation. We are resolving outstanding TVET college funding, claims, reconciliation and student-support matters before they carry forward into the next academic and financial cycle, while tightening controls, visibility, claims processing and provider oversight in student accommodation.
- Stakeholder confidence and transition to ordinary governance. Our stakeholder priorities are focusing on rebuilding trust, reducing uncertainty and ensuring that each stakeholder group receives timely, accurate and actionable information as the scheme transitions from urgent intervention to ordinary governance.
At the heart of it all, I believe that our stabilisation plan is well-considered–while it strictly aligns with the Government Gazette, it also combines further insight from various sources, including various diagnostic data points.
There has been a dispassionate cross-referencing of various data points that have been undertaken to ensure that we are solving the correct challenges with correct solutions.
But our work is already bearing fruit, Minister–we have ensured seamless continuity.
There has been no disruption since we took over.
We have strengthened the Audit and Risk Committee by reappointing and/or appointing new members to address our legacy audit issues.
We have now transitioned from the Rapid Response Team, which has been seized with urgent and burning issues.
We are hard at work already sorting out the close-out report to root out outstanding funding issues.
We are establishing a robust relationship with SARS to support our loan book.
We have worked around the clock to meet all our key stakeholders.
We have also discovered that 15 000 students have irregularly benefited from NSFAS funding.
Thanks to hard work by the SIU.
Honourable Minister, distinguished guests, colleagues, and members of the media, may I conclude my remarks by applauding our Disability Bursary Programme for its empathetic offering of both assistive funding for aids such as wheelchairs.
In specific instances, we support our students living with disabilities by offering them end-to-end human support to enable them to pursue their studies with minimal disruptions.
But we haven’t done enough for this community, as only about 10 000 students living with disabilities have been supported from 2023 to date, which is woefully inadequate. All roleplayers must heighten their efforts to exponentially increase participation.
Honourable Minister, we have to forge stronger ties with higher education institutions who are responsible for identifying students who require disability-related support and submitting compliant applications, together with the prescribed supporting documentation, in accordance with the NSFAS Disability Bursary Policy.
As part of this, we need to attract more numbers by conceiving more purposeful awareness campaigns to attract this crucial community to validate our existence.The task before us is not only to stabilise an institution, but to renew a national promise: that no deserving student should be denied an opportunity because the systems meant to support them have failed.
We therefore move forward with humility, discipline, decisiveness and resolve, knowing that the restoration of NSFAS is also the restoration of hope for the students, families and communities we are entrusted to serve.
Prof Hlengani Mathebula is the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) Administrator.