Wednesday was a hang of a day, and for all the wrong reasons. The student protest that has been rippling through the country like wild fire landed at Parliament’s steps, and disrupted Nhlanhla Nene’s Mid-Term Budget Policy Statement.
The Economic Freedom Fighters took up the cause, and the finance minister’s speech was delayed by 45 minutes.
I’m sure many South Africans were glued to their TVs watching this Zeitgeist of a revolution unfold. I wasn’t. I was stuck in National Treasury, waiting for the magical words “Madam speaker” to free me.
Budget day - both the February and October ones - are a big deal for financial scribes. A bunch of us arrive at Pretoria or Cape Town in the very early hours of the morning, and hand over all and any devices that can communicate with the outside world, and then sit down to write umpteen articles about the budget.
Because we are given every single document related to the speech - including the speech that Nene deviated from yesterday - we are under a strict embargo.
Absolutely nothing can be posted anywhere until the minister starts speaking. And we can’t leave until he does.
So, I missed the live action, but we were all kept up to date by Treasury officials. At one stage, when it looked like the speech may have been postponed, there were even suggestions about all of us sleeping over in the stunning SA Reserve Bank building Treasury calls home.
Yup - the embargo is taken that seriously.
Many South Africans share the students’ concerns. It’s frightfully expensive to get a tertiary education nowadays. Not that it was ever cheap, but varsity costs are rising faster than inflation - which is currently 4.6 percent.
In fact, if you give birth today, putting your darling through a four-year degree will cost R1.2 million.
That’s frightening. My first three-year degree cost around R70 000, and it was mostly that much because I kept having to repeat subjects; because I was too busy working a few part-time jobs to pay for it to actually study.
That’s not a situation I want my little person to go through, which is why there’s an education fund for her.
I’m one of the lucky ones; I can afford to put away cash now.
Many, many others can’t. That’s a painful reality.
I don’t think free education, however, is a panacea. Decent lecturers need to be paid a decent salary, otherwise the free education will be worthless.
A new way
There must be other models we can look at. Take Yale, for example. The Ivy League university in the US has a model that basically splits the fee into two. The student is responsible for half, and their parents for the other.
But, if the student can’t afford to pay, Yale finds them a job. And the parents’ fees are based on a means test.
Or Australia. There, the government will fund a student, and then charge them a nominal interest rate on the loan and students only have to start paying it back when they start work.
In SA, it’s jolly tough to access decent financing, or bursaries, or any help of financial aid. I know this first hand.
There’s no doubt that higher education - in fact education full stop - needs to be better resourced in SA. We need good quality students who can rock the world, and to do that we need to put money into the system.
Sadly, Nene didn’t move any more cash into varsities yesterday. The budget is still the same as it was in February. That may be because I don’t think all the shifting around of money happens at the last minute, and the cash was likely moved before the protests.
It could also be because SA has pretty much used up its rainy day kitty on paying civil servants more.
Regardless, a plan must be made, and capping fees at 6 percent is a good start.
But, and here’s the really big but, even if we manage to drop all education to the point where it is excellent quality and free, where are all these students going to find jobs?
Not in SA - not when economic growth is 1.5 percent for this year, reaching 2.8 percent in 2018. That’s far too low to create jobs.
Will we end up with an entire generation of well-educated young people who can really add value to the country and economy, but who have no choice but to pack for Perth?
* Nicola Mawson is the online editor of Business Report. Follow her on Twitter @NicolaMawson or Business Report @busrep.
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