The latest audit findings on the Namibia Students Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF) should concern every Namibian who believes that public money must be managed with discipline, transparency and purpose.
The issue is not simply that NSFAF recovered only N$21.5 million in student loans during the 2024/25 financial year. The deeper concern is what this figure says about the systems that were supposed to protect and recover a public asset estimated at about N$11.7 billion.
NSFAF exists for an important national purpose. Its mandate is to provide financial assistance to eligible students and, critically, to recover money from beneficiaries after their studies. Student financing is an investment in human capital. But an investment cannot remain sustainable if there is little capacity to recover the money that is contractually owed.
The Auditor-General’s findings therefore deserve more than administrative responses. They demand institutional introspection.
According to the audit findings, the fund could not demonstrate consistently effective recovery action or adequate tracing of debtors. Borrower information had not been properly validated against national databases, while internal tracing had identified deceased borrowers with outstanding debt. This is not merely an accounting inconvenience. It points to weaknesses in the basic information architecture required to manage a large public loan portfolio.
A lending institution cannot recover money from people it cannot reliably identify, locate or account for.
Even more troubling is the N$20.3 million in repayments that remained unallocated in a clearing account. Until payments are properly matched to individual accounts, neither the institution nor the borrower can have complete confidence in the accuracy of the outstanding balance.
This is where governance becomes more than an abstract concept.
A student who owes money should be able to know precisely what has been paid, what remains outstanding, how interest has been calculated and what the repayment obligations are. Equally, NSFAF must know which beneficiaries owe money, how much they owe and what recovery measures have been taken.
That basic chain of accountability appears to have been compromised.
The audit concerns around the treatment of the N$11.7 billion loan book are equally serious. The failure to measure loans at amortised cost in accordance with IPSAS 41, together with inadequate disclosures concerning restatements and reclassifications, raises questions about the reliability and usefulness of the financial information presented to the public.
These are not technical matters that should be dismissed as the language of accountants.
Financial statements are one of the principal mechanisms through which Parliament, government and citizens determine whether a public institution is being properly managed. If the numbers cannot be adequately supported, reconciled or explained, public confidence is inevitably weakened.
There is also a broader question about institutional culture.
The fund reportedly missed the statutory deadline for submitting its financial statements, failed to conduct mandatory mid-year staff performance reviews and could not provide auditors with certain records requested during the audit. Individually, each failure might appear manageable. Collectively, they suggest an organisation whose internal controls were not operating with the level of discipline expected of an institution entrusted with billions of public dollars.
This is particularly significant because NSFAF has now undergone a fundamental institutional change.
The fund ceased operating as a standalone statutory entity on 28 February 2026 following its reintegration into the Ministry of Higher Education, Technology and Innovation. That transition must not become an excuse for the problems identified in the final financial year of the former entity to disappear into administrative restructuring.
On the contrary, reintegration creates an opportunity to start afresh.
The ministry should treat the audit findings as a blueprint for reform rather than merely a historical record. The first priority should be a comprehensive reconciliation and verification of the entire loan book. Every account should be categorised, verified and brought onto a reliable digital platform. Borrowers should be traceable, balances should be defensible and payments should be allocated promptly.
Government should also consider establishing clear recovery performance targets and publishing regular progress reports. The public does not need the private financial information of individual debtors, but it has every right to know how much is owed, how much has been recovered, how much is in arrears and what proportion is considered unrecoverable.
NSFAF should also distinguish between borrowers who genuinely cannot pay and those who simply refuse to pay.
A humane recovery system must recognise unemployment, disability, death and genuine financial hardship. But compassion cannot become an excuse for administrative paralysis. Conversely, debt collection cannot become punitive to the point of undermining the very people the system was created to assist.
NSFAF itself has already moved towards stronger credit discipline. In 2025, it announced that it would submit debtors’ credit-performance data to licensed credit bureaus, a step intended to promote accountability and responsible credit practices. That principle should now form part of a much broader recovery strategy.
There is also an important lesson for students and graduates.
A government-funded student loan is not necessarily free money. Where funding is provided as a loan, beneficiaries have a responsibility to repay it when the contractual conditions require repayment. Every pula recovered can potentially support another student.
But government has an equally important responsibility: it must build a system that is accurate, fair and credible.
The ultimate test of NSFAF’s reintegration will therefore not be whether the old institution has disappeared from the organisational chart. It will be whether the new arrangement can turn a troubled loan book into a functioning revolving investment in Namibia’s human capital.
Namibia cannot afford to spend billions educating its young people and then lose billions through weak administration, poor record-keeping and ineffective debt recovery.
The lesson from this audit is clear: access to education matters, but so does accountability for the money used to provide it.
The new NSFAF era must be defined by neither bureaucracy nor blame, but by something far more important, competent stewardship of a national investment.
That investment belongs to all Namibians.
