NATIONAL NEWS - The University of the Witwatersrand student representative council (SRC) has written to the interim ministerial task team on funding “asking them to plead with the president to sign off the guarantee universities claim they need in order to register students”.
This the student body said it had done “upon realising that students are not allowed to register due to historical debts” and after approaching “university management in an attempt to persuade them to allow students to register”.
The SRC said on Sunday that management told it that it was “approaching a financial deficit of R56-million and they cannot afford to incur the cost of the historical debts‚ which amount to R400-million”.
It said management’s position was that “if they are to allow students to register without a guarantee from the state they would be breaking the law in terms of the credit act”.
“In the initial meeting they told us that they are meeting with the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) to convince them to grant a guarantee so that they can go ahead and register students‚” the student body said in a statement.
“Their report of that meeting was that DHET denied them that guarantee in the argument that they have done all they could with the concessions that are already on the table for NSFAS (National Student Financial Aid Scheme) students.”
Wits management said on Sunday that vice-chancellors met last week “with the DHET for clarity on the support to students in the ‘missing middle’ with historic debt”.
