| Cape Town - Government has failed to provide adequate funding for universities, and Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande should spend less time on “internal politics” and address the crisis, Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane said on Saturday.
“Access to higher education is a critical element in being able to equip young South Africans to take advantage of opportunities and build a better future for themselves,” Maimane said in a statement.
“The DA welcomes the decision taken by Wits University to suspend its decision to hike fees, pending further negotiations. This, however, will not fix the ANC government’s failure to provide adequate funding to our nation’s universities, which is at the heart of these protests,” Maimane said.
When universities did not get enough funding and support from the higher education department, and when the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) - which should be funding every poor South African student accepted into university - was short of R51 billion, “the ANC demonstrates that it doesn’t care about poor students and equipping them with what they need to find employment”.
“The truth is that students should be protesting outside the office of minister Blade Nzimande himself. The funding of higher education in South Africa is in a mess, and is only serving to make life even more difficult for the country’s youth who are bearing the brunt of a sluggish economy and a lack of job opportunities,” he said.
If President Jacob Zuma was serious about creating opportunities for young South Africans, he needed to expedite the establishment and work of the higher education task team to find extra funding for tertiary education, and ensure that the National Treasury was part of the task team.
Wednesday’s medium-term budget policy statement provided government with an excellent opportunity to set out how it intended to solve the higher education funding crisis in the short-term, Maimane said.
“It is also high time that minister Nzimande spend less time on the internal politics of the tripartite alliance and more time on addressing the crisis currently afflicting the education sector he is responsible for.”
The DA had a clear policy alternative to the “opportunity-killing mess the ANC has created” through its higher education funding policy. A DA government would encourage the use of skills levy funding for both short courses and long-term studies at universities and further education and training (FET) colleges, he said.
The DA would also expand the assistance provided through the NSFAS, and ensure that NSFAS funding covered the full cost of study, available as loans and converted to bursaries if studies were successfully completed.
Further, it would provide state sureties for students who did not qualify for NSFAS bursaries and were seeking student loans from commercial banks, and allow students studying towards qualifications in areas where the public service was in need of skills to repay public loans through public service.
“No South African should be denied the opportunity to pursue further studies because they do not have money. This can only change when our government gets its funding priorities right. To do so, it needs the right leadership with the requisite focus,” Maimane said. |