The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) Bursary Scheme was introduced to cater to poor and working class students at public universities, providing fully-subsidised funding for them.
Prior to this, National Student Financial Aid Scheme (Nsfas) was a student loan, which was then converted into a student bursary in 2018.
Nsfas has since announced that they are still continuing with the recovery of debt that was incurred pre-2018.
In detailing Nsfas’ mandate, during the government bursary’s 2023 applications information session, the Head of Recoveries at Nsfas, Prenika Nundlal has shared:
We are trying to raise awareness for debtors to pay back their loans in the state of the free education post 2018.
According to Nsfas, the current state of accounts or loans that were approved before fee-free education were announced as being valid loan agreements since the students and the Scheme entered into an agreement at that time.
It is for this reason that once the debtor has signed the agreement, all the terms and conditions of the agreement are valid and the debtor is also obliged to pay back the funds owed.
Nundlal has also explained Nsfas will recover funds-owed through an internal team and external collections processes on outstanding loan agreements from debtors.
It has been confirmed that the external debt collectors will check outstanding accounts with no payments, this will be followed by SARS doing data matches and handing over those details to the debt collecting teams. Nsfas relies on the nation's tax collecting authority to see if the debtor is now employed or not.
Other than that, these individuals will need to contact Nsfas once they have been employed, so that loan payments are then arranged.
Nundlal said payment arrangements can be made in the following ways: debit order, direct deposits, salary deduction, employer deduction.
Should a debtor want to make payment arrangements or want to enquire about how much their debt stands at, they can contact Nsfas via their collections mailbox which can be reached at [email protected].
