NSFAS or FREE EDUCATION

Although NSFAS and its predecessor, TEFSA, could be applauded for having ‘afforded’ few poor students with tertiary education in the past, the stubborn facts jiggle and expose the model, that it can never be able to fund all needy students primarily because it is under capitalist system.

South African economy is overflowing with enormous wealth to meet the needs of the working class youth, so much that we can say without fear of contradiction; that if the economy was collectively owned,

democratically planned and managed to meet the needs, not the profits of the few, it will only be a matter of state legislation and budget to throw wide open the doors of learning in higher education, free students of debt and provide adequate support for a genuine academic excellence, instead of massive exclusions of students or fraudulent manipulation of their results to prettify the dysfunctional system.

According to Anglo-platinum annual report, in 2009 alone they handed over R29 billion in dividends to their handful of shareholders. This amount is more than enough to pay off the fees of all students in universities and colleges for the whole year. It is more than double the amount necessary to eliminate the massive debt of R13, 4 billion which students accumulated since 1996, in fees owed to universities and loans from NFSAS. The researches show that, top nine companies in the mining industry in 2011 alone have made about R39 billion in profits. This money could have been able to wipe off the student debt and pay free education for two years or otherwise converted to create 2.3 million jobs in the mining industry.

The entire productive capacity of society, which even in terms of the official GDP stand at about R4 trillion and way above R1 00 000 per capita suggest that there is more than enough to meet the demands of the working class people and poor youth, particularly their demand of higher education.

These conditions are however not surprising. They are consequences of many years of neo-liberal onslaught on education. In particular higher education has been commercialized to a point where it has just become another space for accumulation of capital and enrichment of multinational corporate interests which are making millions out of tenders, research and student output.

It is the right of every student to access education, as such, Socialist Youth Movement makes a clarion call for free education rather than schemes that defeats the very purpose of free access to education for all.