/ 1 March 1996

Education budget can’t cover student debt

Students criticise Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu for ignoring their grievances, but the budget simply cannot be stretched to wipe out student arrears totalling R100-milion. Jacquie Golding-Duffy reports

THE most powerful university student group in the country is not impressed with Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu’s refusal to negotiate on the R100-million accumulated student debt.

Stephanie Alais, national education officer for the South African Students’ Congress (Sasco), said this week the minister’s intransigent attitude ”will not make the problem go away”.

She said government had made progress with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and was assisting to some extent. But the R300-million earmarked for student aid was specifically for 1996 tuition and did not come near to addressing the actual requirements for such a scheme — estimated, for this year alone, at R700-million.

Alais said nothing would be resolved unless the ministry, institutions and stakeholders in education sat down and negotiated a solution.

”University and technikon administrations could do much to prevent further disruptions at tertiary institutions if they were to deal sensitively with student grievances,” Alais said.

She said the implications of denying students access to campuses because they had not paid last year’s fees did not solve the problem. Without degrees, she said, students currently in arrears would never be able to pay their debt.

Education Ministry spokesman Lincoln Mali said the ministry would ”definitely not” write off the debt incurred by students at 21 universities and 15 technikons across the country. Mali said the ministry was attempting to ”arrest the decline of higher education”. ”Our handing over of R300-million was the first time in this country’s history that government has supported students studying at a tertiary level. Students should remember that we give what we can based on what we receive from central government.”

He said although the ministry understood the financial problems at tertiary instituitons, it also had to address education issues at other levels.

Sources within the education sector said the fundamental problem facing universities and technikons is the rapid expansion of the higher education sector. Many tertiary institutions previously did not admit black students, but now did, and most could not afford the ever-increasing university fees.

In an address last week to a conference on transforming higher education, Bengu outlined ”sites of (financial) struggle”: the subsidy formulae, a capital works backlog and student aid. He said the ”overall slide in the government subsidy will have been stopped by the middle of this year and, in fact, reversed” — with increases calculated at about R800-million, or 20% over last year. Some R150- million was being allocated to universities and technikons to begin rolling back the backlogs in buildings — ”a significant improvement on the R80-million earmarked for the current financial year”.

Although the cabinet approved the establishment of a National Student Financial Aid Scheme at the end of last year, the ministry had to find resources within its own budget to start up the scheme.

‘An amount of R300-million has been set aside in our 1996/97 budget to get the scheme off the ground,” Bengu said.

He told the conference he had called in the assistance of leaders in the private sector to raise additional resources to further boost the amount as well as to create a sustainable fund for student financing.

There was, simply, not enough money left in the education budget to wipe out student arrears.

”Given the projected additional allocations to subsidies, capital works and the (student aid scheme), which together amount to more than R1,2-billion and a more than 30% increase over the previous year’s budget, there is just no way — or justification — for me or the government to take away money from our other vital national projects to allocate to 1995 student debt. Resources … will have to be found outside government coffers.”

Education sources said the logistics to increase the efficiency of the student aid scheme had to be discussed and parties, including the government, had to consider seriously whether they were going to expand the current scheme into a loan scheme. If this were to happen, commercial banks would have to be approached and included in the process of financing higher education.

The outstanding student debt threatened to cripple predominantly black universities, he said. The government dared not allow the situation to continue and measures would be taken to prevent the collapse of several institutions.