Deputy Minister Cassim calls for urgent action on student issues

Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training, Yusuf Cassim, says student accommodation, campus safety and National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funding problems require urgent attention, as the government steps up efforts to tackle persistent challenges affecting students. Cassim is expected to engage students and management at the University of Fort Hare, where concerns include accommodation conditions and students who have lost NSFAS funding. The funding issue has affected students at Fort Hare and several other institutions, amid wider concerns over suspended funding and administrative delays. Cassim has been using the Deputy Minister’s Helpdesk to escalate student complaints and push for solutions on NSFAS allowances and other funding problems. He says, “Student accommodation is a very big problem across the sector, and it is a very complex problem because the NSFAS has different ways of dealing with accreditation and the payment of student accommodation, particularly private accredited student accommodation. It is very important for me to come to an institution like the University of Fort Hare; I have visited many institutions across the country in order to come and see for myself the conditions. There are also a number of issues that have been raised with my help desk, the deputy minister’s help desk, under the theme of no student left behind, that we would like to see how we address some of those issues”. “There are students that have been defunded from NSFAS, students who haven’t received their allowances from different bursaries and our approach has always been: how can we work together with different partners within the sector, whether it is institutions, whether it is entities like NSFAS or SETAs, or other entities, in order to resolve the issues that might prevent a student from succeeding academically. We want to ensure that any administrative or bureaucratic processes or failures that are setting up students to fail, that we can deal with those issues and that we can unlock whatever the blockages might be, so that a student can be empowered to succeed academically,” says Deputy  Minister Cassim

Deputy Minister Yusuf Cassim is at the University of Fort Hare ’s East London Campus for an official oversight visit. #OversightVisit #HigherEducationMattersZA #Governance https://t.co/UdiBXJkZBt — HigherEducationZA (@HigherEduGovZA) October 5, 2026

Read the full article at SABC News