Western Cape premier Helen Zille has urged Nelson Mandela University students to vote for good governance on Wednesday.
Thousands of NMU students are expected to take to the polls to elect a new Student Representative Council (SRC).
The Democratic Alliance Student Organisation (Daso) will attempt to take back control of the university’s SRC, which is currently run by the South African Students Congress (Sasco).
Zille was addressing students at 3 on Mill, a student residence in Central, on Monday and said students must be careful not to vote for an organisation that had allegedly spent R2m on parties.
Zille said problems being experienced with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) were a result of bad governance.
“When higher education minister Naledi Pandor fired the NSFAS board she saw that they were not doing their job,” Zille said.
“NSFAS is in the mess it is today because it is not putting systems and structures in place to get money to students on time. Their job is to get billions from the government to students in the right amounts and at the right time.”
Zille said the process of getting money to students required good governance.
“Without good governance students will go hungry while one student gets R14m allocated to them,” Zille said.
“The state of NSFAS is a good example of why good governance is important.
“Places that are well governed and well managed are successful for everybody who lives there.
“In July 2018 Statistics SA said Western Cape unemployment, in the narrow definition, dropped to below 20%, by far the lowest in the country, but since we came into office 640,000 jobs have been created since 2009.”
Zille said 680,000 more people were going to the Western Cape in search of jobs.
DA MP and former SRC president Yusuf Cassim claimed the current NMU SRC leadership had spent hundreds of rands on transport for SRC members and events.
“You have an SRC president who is meant to defend students [but who] focuses on parties. We have SRC presidents that will go and hire cars with student money, get drunk, crash those vehicles and pay for those vehicles with the SRC student budget while students were starving,” Cassim said.
“In 2016, Daso SRC spent R250,000 on their pre-registration campaign while this year the SRC spent R350,000.
“The first-year picnic, the Daso-governed SRC had spent R150,000. This year the SRC spent R250,000.”
Cassim said the SRC currently at the helm at NMU also spent R200,000 on its own transport.
Sasco Nelson Mandela Bay chair Avumile Zulu denied all the claims and labelled them propaganda.
“The SRC for 2018 has received a clean audit from the university. We expected Daso to run a propaganda campaign,” Zulu said.