Namibia Students Financial Assistance Fund (NSFAF) Acting Chief Executive Officer, Kennedy Kandume said there is no going back in its quest to recover money owed by beneficiaries of its loans, and not even legal threats will stop the institution from naming the defaulters in newspapers.
Kandume made these remarks on Wednesday in an interview with Nampa, while responding to questions on the resistance from student organisations and civil rights organisations who criticised NSFAF for trying to name and “shame” former beneficiaries who did not pay back their study loans.
NSFAF recently announced that it will publish the names of about 52 000 student loan defaulters in local newspapers countrywide, in an effort to recover the money.
Kandume said the fund is targeting more than N.dollars 2.6 billion that is believed to be matured loans given to beneficiaries from 1997 up to 2017 from beneficiaries who are employed and did not pay back anything. He said they have already written to government executive directors to make arrangements for beneficiaries currently in the employ of government to pay back their loans.
“We are calling upon government ministries, agencies and even private institutions to help the fund in recovering the money. We wrote to executive directors in government to start facilitating the salary deduction, because there is data indicating that most of these beneficiaries are working for government,” said Kandume.
He added that the fund has checked the legality of going after defaulters’ properties and there is provision for that in the law. Therefore, those that failed to pay back their loans are risking their properties to be used as part of the loan repayment.
Student Union of Namibia (SUN) president, Simon Amunime said NSFAF should drop the idea of naming former beneficiaries in the media noting it is a violation of individuals’ privacy and was never part of the contract that students signed, threatening that if NSFAF proceeds with the idea, SUN is prepared to go to court.
Meanwhile, Namibia National Students Organisation spokesperson, Esther Shakela said NSFAF should not be gravely detached from the reality that the average young Namibian can genuinely not repay the loans in the face of the increasing unemployment rate.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency
