Date: 21/04/2004
Source: Department of Education
Title: K Asmal: National Student Financial Aid Scheme Awards Dinner


ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, MINISTER OF EDUCATION, AT THE NATIONAL STUDENT FINANCIAL AID SCHEME (NSFAS) AWARDS DINNER, CAMPS BAY, CAPE TOWN, 21 April 2004

The Chairperson of the Board of NSFAS
The Chief Executive Officer of NSFAS
Members of the Board
Vice Chancellors
Honoured Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great pleasure to be here tonight, this being one of my very last tasks as the Minister of Education in the outgoing government. Of course, what happens after 27 April is anyone's guess, except for the President, who does not have to guess, because he knows exactly what he is doing.

Over the past few weeks, I have been attending events that are very important to me as Minister of Education. We had our annual Most Improved School Awards, where each year we recognise tremendous accomplishments of our schools in overcoming adversity and achieving excellence. We held our department's celebration, "Keeping the Memory Alive, Shaping the Future," where we launched an array of new books for teaching and learning about our history. On Monday, I spoke at two different venues to thousands of Grade 10, 11 and 12 students as part of a teacher recruitment road show. I spoke about the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, which ensures that poverty will never be a bar to bright young students who want to enter the noble profession of teaching. Tonight, we celebrate our National Student Financial Aid Scheme that has been enabling deserving students to gain access to higher education.

These three recent events, the Most Improved School Awards, the celebration of our history, and the recognition of our National Student Financial Aid Scheme, are very dear to my heart. They capture the essence of what we have been working together to accomplish in education. These events remind us that we have travelled far together over the past five years in education.

At the Most Improved School Awards we celebrated the dramatic improvements in our schools, from achievements in mathematics, science, and technology to advances in non-racialism and integration-that affirm our hope in the present.

At our celebration of "Keeping the Memory Alive, Shaping the Future," we reconnected with our past as a source of values. As an important part of our Values in Education Initiative, the revitalisation of teaching and learning about our history is crucial to maintaining our trust with the past.

Tonight, as we celebrate our National Student Financial Aid Scheme, we reaffirm our commitment to maintaining trust with our past and recognising our hope in the present. But we also commit our resources-human and financial-to opening the future for our students in higher education.

The last five years have been amongst the most exciting of my life. Being the custodian of education in South Africa has been a challenging and exhilarating experience. It has been an enormous trust, of course, which is vitally important to the future of our country. Keeping this trust requires resources. It takes money. Throughout my term as Minister of Education I have had a bumper sticker on my office door, which some of you may have seen, which reads: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance".

We are prepared for the expense. Education takes a lion's share of annual budget. But it is money well spent because the development and advancement of our country-no longer a new democracy, but a maturing democracy, as our elections last week have shown-depends on the human-resource development strategy that we are implementing. Investing in our people, we know, is a good investment.

While I have had concurrent responsibility with the provinces for most of the education portfolio, the area of higher education is a national responsibility, a responsibility I have relished and tackled with enthusiasm. A key element in higher education has been access to higher education institutions. Crucial to access has been the question of funding.

In this respect the National Student Financial Aid Scheme has been a programme to which I have paid particular attention. I am pleased to see how much it has grown and developed.

Let me briefly tell the history. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme was born out of an extraordinary partnership between the international community, particularly the European Union, and civil society organisations in South Africa, especially the Independent Development Trust and Kagiso Trust. NSFAS had its humble beginnings in the offices of the IDT, which are now used as the back rooms for the Five Flies Restaurant in Keerom Street. NSFAS has recently moved to more spacious offices in Wynberg, having also spent a number of years in Plumstead. Whether their current location, which is so close to the Wynberg Police Station and Magistrate's Court, has anything to do with their strategy for dealing with loan defaulters, I think, remains to be seen.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme, following on from its predecessor, TEFSA, has been one of the flagship redistribution and poverty alleviation programmes of government over the past ten years. Although the almost exponential increases in recent years could not be sustained because of other demands, government still endeavours to ensure that there is a real increase each year in funding for student aid. This is another tangible commitment from government in support of access and equity in higher education.

The Minister of Finance has sometimes been given unwarranted representation as a Dickensian "Scrooge". This is untrue! He has been a developmental Minister of Finance. I know he supports student financial aid. In an astonishing flash of understanding, he has described the NSFAS as one of the most important redress initiatives of this country. As such, it is certainly worthy of support.

But NSFAS, itself, is showing that it can be sustainable. Of the normal funding that has been allocated this year, including the ring-fenced amount for teacher education, R208 million of the R773 million, in other words 27% of the allocation, results from loan recoveries of one sort or another. Regular monthly loan recoveries have now reached nearly R18 million. It is anticipated that this will increase even more. It is a credit to NSFAS, particularly its staff and its systems, that this is possible. As a result, at least 20 000 students will be financed this year from loan recoveries alone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this deserves special recognition. I would like to ask the staff of NSFAS who work at the office here in Cape Town to stand so that we can give them a round of applause . . .. Thank you.

Many of them do not get the opportunity to see the fruits of their labour. Many do not get out to visit higher education institutions in our country to see the enormous benefits emanating from tens of thousands of awards that are given out annually-112 000 awards in 2003 alone.

Last year, 25 percent of all undergraduate students at South African public institutions of higher education received a grant from NSFAS or a special grant administered by NSFAS. This is a remarkable level of support.

Tonight, as we recognise the work of our financial aid bureaus, we also recognise crucial partnerships that have formed between NSFAS and higher education institutions. The staff of the financial aid bureaus is literally at the coalface of student funding, dealing daily with deserving and needy students. And there are many. I know that in recent months Allan Taylor and Mvuyo Macanda have been visiting institutions around the country to get on-the-spot assessments of the status of student financial aid. As they tell me about their visits, I am struck again by the extent of the poverty that affects so many of our students. This is our stark reality. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme is absolutely crucial in our efforts to deal with our reality.

Notwithstanding the significant amounts already being spent on financial assistance to students, we know that we could do with more funding. We could do with at least twice as much more as we are currently allocating.

While we look for funding, we need to be sensitive about the plight of poor, especially chronically poor, students. Of course, this is difficult for many institutions that are already cash-strapped, but it is a problem we cannot ignore.

I know that many of our institutions of higher education have developed innovative approaches to dealing with poverty and have put programmes and processes in place to assist very poor students.

Certainly, this problem has not escaped the eye of the President, who, in a recent interview with City Press, said that government would be paying more attention to the financial aid provided to students at tertiary institutions.

In the normal course of things, our student financial aid programme is coming up for review. Incidentally, I have noticed that every time government reviews a programme, some people take this as a sign of weakness. But every programme must be reviewed. It is a sign of our self-confidence. There must be an open and constructive debate. In addressing issues of student financial aid, we will convene a special meeting of Vice-Chancellors. We will explore together ways and means that we can come up with to enhance our current system. All of us, I know, want to ensure equity. We all want to expand access. We all want to work together to create opportunities for our young people to gain the knowledge, skills and capacities for meeting the needs of our country.

Ten years ago, in 1994, President Nelson Mandela committed the government to "invest substantial amounts in education and training in order to ensure that we empower the workers, raise productivity levels and meet the skills needs of a modern economy". Ten years later, in 2004, President Thabo Mbeki called upon students "to plough their skills, expertise and resources back into the communities as well as their former institutions. Because education is the hallmark of a developing and successful nation, we need skills of our graduates so that we can move forward faster."

Over the past ten years, we have seen returns on the investment in education that President Nelson Mandela urged us to make. But education is a special kind of exchange. Education is a peculiar kind of exchange. You get by giving.

As President Mbeki said, you only realise the returns on this exchange by giving back what you have gained. You can only realise the value of education by giving back your skills, expertise and resources to your society, your community, and your institution of higher education.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme is crucial to this exchange. The NSFAS is contributing to our objective of opening the doors of learning and enabling our deserving students to walk through those doors. I congratulate everyone involved for the good work you are doing.

In closing, I thank the NSFAS Board, which I appointed four years ago and whose term expires at the end of June, for their dedication and service to financial aid in South Africa. The Board has been an example of commitment and loyalty to a very important programme in the education sector. Their work has made our national financial scheme a programme that is justifiably ranked amongst the best initiatives in the world for supporting students in higher education. It is cost effective and highly professional.

As I look back over the progress we have made in the NSFAS, I think of my dear friend, the great Irish poet, the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who recalled how he learned the value of education when he was growing up in a dirt-poor farming community in Ireland. The farmers, sweating and digging in their fields, would see him carrying his books home from school. They would call out to him: "Hey, Seamus. Don't forget: Learning is a light load to carry."

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme has made learning a lighter load to carry for so many of our students, parents, and families. I congratulate everyone involved in helping to lift the burdens on learning. As a nation, we are all grateful for your efforts.

I thank you all.

Issued by: Department of Education
21 April 2004
Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)