Funding free tertiary education must be sustainable balancing act: Gordhan
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan says when considering how to fund free higher education in future, government must approach the matter in a manageable, balanced way that will not hurt the state’s purse.
“We’ve got the numbers, so we have to work out how, in a manageable and balanced way, government approaches that question and that proposition,” Gordhan told the Commission of Inquiry into Higher Education and Training in Centurion.
He said every government department or entity within government would be able to justify why it needed a bigger slice of the fiscal cake than they currently had, “but the reality is that that’s not how life works”.
“There will always be a tension between requirement and what is available in reality,” Gordhan said.
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He said there were times where more money was required in a specific department, and other times where good leadership, good management, good systems, good supervision revealed better results.
“And the same amount of money gives you much better impact.”
Gordhan said there was no “necessarily need” for upheavals in order to attract funding because government already had policies in place to address such problems.
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“There has been a policy shift in December 2015 or thereabout and that policy shift required that new funds be found, and that those funds be found in a very constrained environment, and we’ve done our best as the government to find those funds and meet some of the immediate needs that we have whilst at the same time, we all acknowledge that we need to do longer term planning.”
Gordhan also questioned whether it was wise for government to react to such upheavals, at the expense of other government programmes.