Watch – Inside NSFAS boss Mathebula’s R110,000-plus spending

While tertiary students across South Africa demand an increase in food allowances and an accommodation cap, the upper echelon of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) appears to be operating on a vastly different budget, including eyebrow-raising spending on hotels. Siyabonga Goni reports.

Reporting by: Siyabonga Goni
Filmed by: Joel Seboa
Edited by: Anda Tolibadi
Produced by: Emilie Gambade
Creative input by: Malibongwe Tyilo
Sub-edited by: Kevin Flynn

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While NSFAS-funded students are calling for a bigger food and accommodation allowance, invoices I’ve obtained show a very different picture at the top of the program.

Here is what the invoices show. In the last week of May 2026, NSFAS Administrator Hlengani Mathebula was booked into two different luxury hotels in Cape Town, at the same time. R9,200 for four nights at the Pepperclub Hotel and Spa. R14,850 for a luxury suite at the Westin — for three of those exact same nights. Two five-star rooms, one man, one city, paid for simultaneously by taxpayers.

I asked NSFAS how this happened. Their explanation: a prior Pepperclub booking couldn’t be cancelled, for unspecified health reasons, and by then hotels were fully booked because of budget vote season.

When I pushed on whose health issue this actually was, they couldn’t say. The thing is, under Treasury’s own travel rules, a failed cancellation like this is officially classified as fruitless and wasteful expenditure, the traveller is supposed to personally repay it. NSFAS told me Mathebula isn’t liable.

That wasn’t the only booking. From mid-June to the start of August — 49 nights — NSFAS paid RR86,811.67 to put Mathebula up at a private holiday estate in Cape Town. Why in an estate, for seven weeks? NSFAS wouldn’t say. Instead, they told me his administration is actually the leanest one NSFAS has had, by both headcount and spend.

Except Mathebula has also brought in four advisers, on salaries totalling close to 10 million rand a year. NSFAS says he spent his first month alone, assessing what he needed, before appointing them one by one. The department backs him up, pointing out that past NSFAS leadership structures cost even more, one technical support team ran to R19.6million a year, and the old board’s committees cost 31 million.

Meanwhile, here’s what NSFAS-funded students are actually living on: R1716 a month. Students I’ve spoken to say that’s barely enough for groceries and toiletries. Some skip meals to make it stretch, some dip into savings, some send part of it home. The national students’ union calls the allowance grossly inadequate, and says students are walking long distances because they can’t afford transport, and going without academic materials just to eat.

When I asked NSFAS whether they’re planning to raise that allowance, they told me they weren’t inclined to answer.

NSFAS maintains that all of Mathebula’s travel and accommodation was reasonably priced, and that his administration is the most cost-effective that NSFAS has had. Students having to survive on less than R2000 a month, while the chief custodian of their financial aid spends weeks on end living at a holiday resort, may feel differently. DM