One could highlight several other issues, like chronic failures in basic education, or the stagnancy in the primary healthcare system. One could speak about the state’s mismanagement of certain public owned companies, or the high crime rate. But the case is already made. South Africa is not progressing steadily. Any suggestion that it is, is a ploy to lull the population into a false sense of security, a stupor from which we allow the powerful to abuse the institutions we entrust to them. If we continue to set apartheid as the benchmark for success, we will always be in a condition of ‘progress’, even if people are suffering intolerably. Dissatisfaction at the local level shows citizens are waking up. Two decades on, we can’t keep re-rewarding the ANC for the same achievements while people’s lives don’t improve – not least because of what the ANC stated in the Reconstruction and Development Plan, which was intended to be the foundation of its future economic and social policies:
No political democracy can survive and flourish if the mass of our people remain in poverty, without land, without tangible prospects for a better life. Attacking poverty and deprivation must therefore be the first priority of a democratic government.54
MYTH TWO:
Free Education Is Unachievable
Free university education for the poor in South Africa is feasible, but will require significant additional funding of both National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) and the university system.
– The Working Group on Fee-Free Education for the Poor55
It is the 23rd of October 2015. Thirty thousand students are marching on the Union Buildings. They want free education, and they want it pronto. They won’t be deterred by tons of tear-gas-toting police officers, fresh from campus-cum-warzones, glaring back behind barbed-wire fences. Everyone knew this was coming, but no one seems prepared. Across the country, the police release pink smoke bombs, which rise like ironic clouds of authoritarian fairy dust around fallists of every stripe and description. Welcome to the future … the future we tried to avoid. Debates over free education have split South Africa. Students vehemently maintain it is possible; University bureaucrats, government ministers and the commentariat think not. The students are right: it’s time to debunk the myth that free education is unachievable.56
The global picture
Exorbitant university fees are a relatively recent phenomenon. In China, Britain and Australia, tuition fees were only introduced about a decade and a half ago.57 The global picture is diverse, though the trend is towards rapid fees increases. For example, in the United States, fees have increased exponentially since the mid-1990s. In 1974, a public college’s four-year tuition cost an American $10 000 in 2015 prices; today it costs $32 500.58 The argument was that financial aid would offset these price hikes, but this has led to a debt bomb compared with the housing crisis of 2008.59 Since 1990, the cost of higher education increased at double the rate of healthcare and quadruple that of inflation.
In Britain, since Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ introduced tuition fees in 1998, students have experienced their fees skyrocketing from zero to £9 000 per year in less than a decade. The same is true in Australia, where tuition fees began in 2001 under the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, an income-contingent loan system administered by the tax authority. Thailand too operates a funding scheme through an income-dependent post-employment loan.60
The situation is different in the BRICS nations. In Russia, free education remains a constitutional guarantee, but the government has expanded the definition to meet demand: Russians sit an entrance exam to determine which students are eligible for free education.61 Students who fail the exam still pay tuition fees, or are subsumed by a growing private tertiary education sector. In Brazil, most of the country’s most prestigious public universities are free. However, attendance at the institutions is dominated by relatively wealthy students.62 As in Russia, a large private sector has ironically incorporated the residual poor students who pay fees. In India, tuition fees exist, but needy students are covered by a loan scheme similar to the South African model.
In several Scandinavian countries, Scotland, and Germany, education is free. In fact, in countries like Sweden, students are paid to go to university. Even international students benefit from free education in some European countries. Recently, some universities in these countries have begun charging very low, almost symbolic fees, but even these steps have been challenged by student protests. Thus, over the last two decades, an assault on students’ pockets has left all but a few places in the world untouched by the rampant march of fees.
The South African picture
There are 26 universities in South Africa, of which twelve are ‘traditional universities’. These focus on academic subjects, and include institutions like the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Eight of the 26 are universities of technology, which have a vocational focus. These include institutions like Durban University of Technology and Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The remaining six are comprehensive universities which deal with both vocational and academic subjects. They include universities like the University of Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Furthermore, there are over a million students at South Africa’s universities, double the number since 1994. In 2017, government will spend about R65bn on higher education via subsidies, covering half of universities’ current costs. The other half is covered by private donations and student fees. Over the last decade, universities have dramatically increased the burden borne by students as a proportion of total funding, which increased by an incredible 30% between 2000 and 2012. Universities say this is because the government subsidy fell over the same period, but this is not accurate: the subsidy contributed relatively less to the total as fees rose, but fees often rose much faster than the subsidy fell. For universities to suggest that they were responding to lower subsidies alone is incorrect: they used this as a guise to transfer costs disproportionately onto students. This is evident in the fact that, in some years, the subsidy actually increased in real terms and fees still increased. Between 2010 and 2012, nominal fees revenue increased by 43%.
However, cost-transfer has not been spread evenly. As Figure 1 shows, universities like UCT, UJ, and Wits transferred the proportional contribution of fees onto students more than other universities between 2009 and 2015. On the other hand, universities like Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT), Walter Sisulu University (WSU), and Vaal University of Technology (VUT) actually reduced the burden in some years of that period.
Figure 163
Defining free education
Can South Africa afford free education? If so, how soon? This depends on what we mean by ‘free education’. The term is sometimes just used to describe affordable fees. Others mean that the whole educational experience is free, including meals, accommodation, books, study materials, travel and a stipend for living expenses. Still others mean free tuition: no student would have to pay for their courses, and they would not be accepted based on their ability to pay fees for a given course. Here, I will focus on free tuition, which is the first step to a fully free educational system and the most achievable policy option in the next five years.
In this context, the best figures we have for total university fees revenue come from a report from 2012, published by PwC. In that year, total fees revenue was R15bn. The South African budget was about R1tn. Therefore, to fund every student at South Africa’s universities, government would need to find an additional R15bn per year, on 2012 prices.64 This could happen in various ways. First, it could happen through economic growth, but let’s assume that growth is stagnant. Another option would be raising additional tax. This would mean increasing corporate and income tax by about 1% each. Those who squirm at this thought should be reminded that businesses are already offered tax breaks for donations to universities. A possible alternative arrangement could be to pressure corporations to donate to a special tax-incentivised fund for free education.
Alternatively, the money could be found by reallocating money meant for other governmental projects, or reducing wasteful expenditure and corruption. Indeed, the total amount