The Fee-free report on Higher Education was not hidden but it was subjected to a process of policy dialogue.

In the mist of the challenges occasioned by the #Feesmustfall wave, the Minister and his Department were in complex engagements with Vice Chancellors and student leaders to find solutions day and night, especially national student leaders.

The Ministry and Minister in particular, had to be diverted from this major focus to ward off the red-herring from Mail and Guardian reporting that he has been sitting on top of the report to implement free education.

Indeed this was damaging to the extreme, and the intentions of this, including the quoted sources was to impugn and vassalage Minister Blade Nzimande. Now that the dust is settling and rationality of mind is returning in some quarters, let’s put facts on this matter by way of clarification.

The Ministerial Working Group on Fee-Free Higher Education was established in March 2012 to investigate and advise on the feasibility of making university education fee-free for the poor in South Africa (see here - PDF). The Working Group submitted a draft report in October 2012 and thereafter finalised it in August 2013. Although the report was not formally published, the contents of the report were discussed at a number of stakeholder forums and has since been uploaded onto the Department’s website.    

The Ministerial Working Group advised that fee-free university education for the poor is feasible, if built on the current National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) cost sharing and recovery model.

The implementation of fee-free university education is dependent on significant funding made available, but the quantum of funding required varies depending on the range of parameters and policy decisions. The report recommended that NSFAS be strengthened to implement the scheme and a policy dialogue should be put in place to discuss the parameters and develop regulations for implementation. However, before the final policy and regulations can be published, funding to support the scheme needs to be secured.

The main reason for not publishing the report at the time was due to the need to clarify policy positions and obtain agreement on how the scheme could effectively be financed. A policy dialogue would be required to advise on the hard policy decisions that have to be made in order to extend the scheme to cover all qualifying students.

Policy issues such as the definition of the poverty threshold (poverty is a relative concept), what should be covered (full cost of study or only tuition and books), the amount of the loan to be converted into a bursary, the interest rate to be charged once the student has completed their studies, the percentage of monthly income to be paid back into the scheme once the graduate is successfully employed, as well as the definition of academic progress. Depending on how these parameters are set, the scheme would either support more or less students.

A Policy Dialogue comprising of the Department, NSFAS, Universities South Africa, University Council Chairs Forum, National Treasury, South African Union of Students and Council on Higher Education has been established to identify current and projected funding challenges, propose policy and legislative amendments in line with the recommendations of the Working Group on fee-free education, as well as the recommendations articulated in the National Development Plan that “all students who qualify for NSFAS must be provided access to full funding through loans and bursaries to cover costs of tuition, books, accommodation and living expenses”.

Therefore, the decision was not to release the report, but rather to deal with the key policy decisions through the policy dialogue and take the process forward through legislative changes. Until such a time that we exhaust all of this processes, it was entirely going to be injudicious for the Department to release a report whose recommendations were to be subjected to a policy dialogue and therefore legislative process.

Khaye Nkwanyana is the Spokesperson for the Ministry of Higher Education and Training.