By Anita Dangazele
- Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka will launch a new investigation into student housing, after finding serious problems at NSFAS.
- More than 40,000 students at 76 institutions got money they didn’t qualify for, R5.1 billion in total, an earlier investigation found.
Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka says her office will launch a new investigation into student housing.
This comes after she confirmed there are serious, long-running problems in how the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, or NSFAS, is run.
Gcaleka said her office looked into complaints about how NSFAS is managed, and found the problems are real. She said NSFAS has been put under administration three times in the past eight years, meaning outside managers had to be brought in to run it because it kept struggling.
Her findings build on an earlier investigation by the Special Investigating Unit. That investigation found NSFAS paid out R5.1 billion to more than 40,000 students at 76 universities and colleges between 2018 and 2021, even though these students didn’t qualify for the money. Only students whose family earns less than R350,000 a year are meant to get NSFAS funding. Investigators found many of these students never even handed in their parents’ financial information, so proper checks were never done.
Gcaleka said her investigation also found serious problems with student housing, including the risk of fraud and students being taken advantage of. This isn’t the first time this has come up. Back in 2023, NSFAS’s own chairperson told Parliament that “mafias” were operating in the student housing space, working together with accommodation providers in dishonest ways.
NSFAS said at the time that its CEO, Andile Nongogo, had received threatening messages after he started looking into changing how student housing is handled.
Pictured above: Public Protector Kholeka Gcaleka.
Image source: Public Protector South Africa
