Africa-Press – South-Africa. Cape Town – Outgoing National Student Financial Aid Scheme Administrator Randall Carolissen described his tenure at the head of the bursary scheme, where he faced alleged death threats for following due process, as tough but filled with valuable lessons.
As Carolissen’s 30-month term comes to an end on Thursday, he told the Cape Times that campuses and the higher education sector were in upheaval when he took on the job.
“When the government places an organisation under administration, it is an extreme measure. In a very short space, we had to stabilise the situation. In three weeks, we had to pay R14 billion to fix the financial system and get the imperfect IT system to work.”
Carolissen said from 2019, they were able to approve students prior to them going to university.
“That meant students did not have to pay upfront payments or registration fees, which in the past, was a huge problem,” he said.
In August, allegations of nepotism were levelled at Carolissen. He also came under criticism for the delays in procuring laptops to enable participation in online studies during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Carolissen said he was not perfect and mistakes were made, but he had done nothing wrong.
“The smear campaign had to do with allegations of nepotism. I provided facts to parliament and to the public protector. The major problem was safety issues which had developed after the cancellation of laptops because all of a sudden, all hell broke loose.”
Carolissen said the tender process, was to be managed by government, for the R3.6 billion required for 720 000 students.
“Initially, the government was going to use the central procurement to get volumes and to get better prices. However, National Treasury came back to say that NSFAS must manage this programme. We consulted with the chief procurement officer of the National Treasury, and we laid down four guidelines,” said Carolissen.
The guidelines included localisation, computers not to be imported, BEE requirements and insisted that 30% must go to SMMEs.
“They must provide us with proof that they can supply 50 000 or had supplied 50 000 computers in the past. We had 150 applicants, and all of them failed on the basis of the criteria.
“There were rumours that developed, including that people were kicked out of the system. I don’t make the decision. I get a decision from an adjudication committee,” he said.
According to Carolissen, he was informed one supplier qualified, but upon investigation, did not.
“We sat again with the National Treasury and came to the conclusion that the requirement of 50 000 computers was too high and we lowered that to 10 000. The second round of tenders then gave us five suppliers that can now supply computers to institutions from next year onwards,” he said.
He claimed his refusal to bypass the rules under the enormous amount of pressure resulted in death threats.
Carolissen alleged he and his wife received threats in various forms including emails and his home in Pretoria and flat in Cape Town were broken into.
Carolissen subsequently hired armed protection for his property and family.
“Killing me would not have changed anything because there is no way that the systems that we had put up could have been bypassed and National Treasury would not have allowed us.
’’If people have evidence to back up their allegations of corruption, they must go to the police.”
Carolissen said despite “bad apples”, most staff at NSFAS were good people and took their work seriously.
“We would not have achieved this without that understanding that we serve in the nation. Unfortunately, there were a few people that, despite our best efforts, they went out of their way to sabotage the administration because we stopped the excess looting and fraud.
“We had people that issued themselves vouchers and went to go eat at Kentucky. Some people in NSFAS, still there, have created fictitious students, together with universities and TVETS, and they are paying those students.”
Carolissen said, since December 1, he had been working to hand over to the new CEO, chairperson of the South African Civil Aviation Authority, Ernest Khosa.
“Planning for the 2021 academic year as there have been some extensions for some institutions. Also, planning for the larger than normal numbers of applications. We estimate we will have about 900 000 applications in total. Last year around this time, we had 450 000, close to double,” said Carolissen.
This could be due to Covid-19 financial strain on households, he said.
