EDITORIAL: Nzimande echoes Zuma’s student loan promise
Minister mired in graft scandal has announced a half-baked loan scheme for the ‘missing middle’
History has just repeated itself. Six years ago former president Jacob Zuma, under growing political pressure to step down over allegations of corruption, announced the government would provide free higher education to students from poor and working-class families. His shock move had no budget to back it up and was directly at odds with the recommendations of the Heher Commission, which had concluded that free higher education was unaffordable.
Now higher education, science & innovation minister Blade Nzimande, who is mired in a corruption scandal of his own, has announced a half-baked loan scheme for the “missing middle”. These are students who don’t qualify for free higher education because they come from families with an annual income above R350,000, but are too poor to afford fees. Clearly concerned with deflecting attention from his own troubles, which centre on allegations that he received kickbacks from service providers to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSF...
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