More than 200 Mpumalanga students sent to Russia to study medicine, engineering and aviation have been left hungry, homeless and humiliated by a R63-million bursary scheme that collapsed under greed and incompetence.
Over the past nine years, the provincial government has poured millions into a programme meant to build the province’s brightest minds. Instead, it buried their hopes.
Two students died of natural causes while pursuing their education there, 16 have dropped out, and dozens more have faced eviction, hunger and despair as government payments vanished into a maze of middlemen and forged invoices.
According to a report tabled before the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), the Mpumalanga Department of Education admitted it has since 2016 sent hundreds of students to the Russian Federation to study critical skills.
But what began as an international education dream soon devolved into one of the province’s most expensive scandals.
The department appointed a company named Green Tutu Trading, trading as RACUS, to manage logistics and welfare for 368 students. The company was neither a university nor an accredited academic partner, but a recruitment agency that inserted itself between the province and Russian institutions.
Investigators found that the department paid millions to RACUS without verified invoices, while students were being expelled and evicted from hostels. Some invoices were duplicated, others handwritten, and several lacked even the names of the universities.
Exchange-rate conversions from dollars to rand were also never confirmed, allowing the agency to inflate costs without oversight.
The DA’s provincial education spokesperson, Annerie Weber, said the entire process was flawed from the beginning.
“In 2016, the department appointed a service provider called Green Tutu Trading on an initial contract worth R65-million to manage 368 students sent to Russia,” she said.
“The department was overcharged, paid without valid invoices, and some of the students were not even South Africans.”
Weber said the contract expired in 2021 and was not renewed, which delayed payments for more than 200 students still enrolled in 14 Russian universities.
“Some were left stranded with no accommodation, food or their R5 000 monthly stipends,” she said.
“The Russia-Ukraine war then worsened their suffering as sanctions hit the host country’s economy.”
The Auditor-General flagged the contract as a “material irregularity”, citing double commissions, manipulated currency conversions and missing documentation.
As the crisis deepened, then premier Refilwe Mtsweni-Tsipane flew to Moscow in November 2022 after months of complaints from desperate students.
She led a high-level delegation to meet Russian officials, universities and students in an effort to salvage the programme.
“Some institutions, including RACUS, were not agreeable to providing invoices and academic records of students directly from the universities,” her report stated, at the time.
This was confirmed in the report submitted to Scopa this week.
The report also confirmed that “the embassy in Russia is now the one responsible for payment to universities” after the Department of International Relations and Co-operation and the South African embassy in Moscow intervened.
