Why Sizwe Nxasana quit student aid scheme
The financial-aid logjam in higher education can be resolved by better management. But growing the economy to make the policy affordable is going to be far more difficult
The resignation of corporate heavyweight Sizwe Nxasana as chair of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and the government decision to place it under administration is a textbook case of how not to manage policy change. Former president Jacob Zuma’s announcement on December 16 that higher education would, from 2018, be free for all qualifying poor students came like a bolt from the blue. With just weeks to go before the start of the academic year, NSFAS had to gear up to handle a deluge of applications, which surged to more than 600,000 against the usual 400,000. And then it had to wait until April to get the required funding. It would have been a tall order for an efficient, respected institution to manage the situation — but NSFAS was neither. Operationally, it had a new CEO in Steven Zwane. He was still bedding down the change, made in 2016, from a system in which the 26 universities administered their own financial aid to one that centralised everything under NSFAS....
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