- Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande, NSFAS leadership and the four companies appointed to administer NSFAS’ new direct payment system appeared before Parliament on Wednesday night.
- The Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Innovation was unimpressed with the lack of detail in the companies’ presentations and requested information on exactly how many students have received their allowances through the new system.
- Nzimande accused the committee chair of usurping his powers by issuing them with the instruction.
A meeting of the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Innovation turned fiery on Wednesday night, with Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande accusing committee chair Nompendulo Mkhatshwa of usurping his ministerial powers.
Nzimande appeared before the committee along with the leadership of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and the four companies appointed to administer the new NSFAS direct payment system to answer to the litany of issues that have plagued the system.
Students have been faced with late payments and non-payment of allowances for food and other essentials, as well as high transaction costs attached to the new accounts they were issued under the new system.
The committee was less than impressed by presentations from the four companies – Tenet Technology, eZaga, Norraco and Coinvest – with the DA’s Karabo Khakhau saying “there was a whole lot of communication around the mandate but little on the core issues facing the system”.
Mkhatshwa said while the companies had provided information on how many students they were meant to be dispersing allowances to and how many had been verified and issued cards, for example, what the committee wanted to know was how many had been paid and this was still not clear.
Ultimately, she ended up asking the companies to provide the committee with these details – at an institutional level – within the next seven days.
This got Nzimande hot under the collar.
He fumed:
I have never heard that a portfolio committed can instruct a member of the executive or an organ of the executive to say ‘do this or that’. That goes beyond oversight. Parliament plays an oversight role. I am very worried about beginning to give instructions that, at the end of the day, you can’t enforce as the portfolio committee.
“What happens if those instructions are not respected? What are you going to do as the portfolio committee? There’s nothing you will do; you will have to come back to me as the minister and say: ‘Minister, we instructed this [and it] is not happening; can you please act’.
“I think you are going beyond the powers of a committee in terms of the instruction you are giving. And I can’t allow that as a minister.
“I will have to raise it and, if need be, we need to take it [up] with higher structures because you are now essentially usurping the powers of the management of NSFAS and the powers of the board of NSFAS. In the end, you are also usurping my own powers in terms of intervention. I can’t be giving an instruction to do this and you are also giving a parallel instruction.”
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But Mkhatshwa stood her ground.
“There are funds that are voted for by this Parliament that we’ve given to departments and their entities, and they’ve extended that responsibility to service providers to disperse and manage on our behalf and on behalf of citizens,” she said.”In this meeting, service providers have not been able to bring us into their confidence on whether or not all students they are responsible for dispersing [funds] to have actually received those allowances and whether or not they have indeed dispersed those allowances.
Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Blade Nzimande.
“What we require from service providers is information, and Parliament is well within its right to be afforded and to be privy to information in respect of citizens. This, of course, is based on the legal advice we have received in terms of how and what we need to interact with service providers … We are not instructing anyone to do anything; we are saying give us the information that will afford us the right to fulfil our function in terms of ensuring that we take the issues of citizens to Parliament and to government.”
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