Jannie Mouton’s R7.2-billion panacea could heal South African education

When Jan Mouton, son of Jannie Mouton and spokesperson for the family foundation, explained to Daily Maverick why they were offering R7.2-billion for Curro Holdings, he kept insisting on one word: donation. Not “buyout”, not “takeover”, not “acquisition”.

“This is the biggest donation in the history of South Africa,” Mouton said, his voice catching somewhere between corporate announcement and missionary evangelism. 

“The shares purchased by the foundation will be a donation to the public of South Africa.” It’s a curious turn of phrase for what, on paper, looks like a classic scheme arrangement: a R13-per-share offer, representing a 60% premium on Curro’s stock, to buy out minority shareholders and delist the com­pany from the JSE.

But Mouton’s choice of words matters. If the transaction passes shareholder and court muster, Curro will cease to be a profit-­making company and instead become a non-profit company (NPC) and public benefit organisation (PBO).

That’s the point he is making with his phrasing: it looks like a buyout, is priced like a buyout, but is, in fact, a structural shift in how education might be funded, run and expanded in South Africa.

“You can even build schools in areas where a for-profit business would never build a school because it won’t ever make financial sense,” he explained.

“And in essence you run it for the benefit of the South African public.”

That sentence is worth lingering on. South Africa’s public education system is buckling under demand, is under-resourced, and is haemorrhaging credibility.

At the same time, private schools, once a niche luxury, now educate more than 740,000 learners, about 5% of the total learners in the country. Curro alone teaches more than 71,000 children. 

If a private school group the size of Curro is flipped into a non-profit designed to re­invest every rand back into classrooms and bursaries, it forces us to ask: is this the ­model we’ve been waiting for?

Donation or corporate deal?

The mechanics of the deal are corporate, not charitable. The Jannie Mouton Stigting (Foundation) is offering R13.00 per Curro share, a large premium on the R8.13 closing price before the announcement.

Shareholders will re­ceive a mix of cash, Ca­­pitec shares and PSG Financial Services shares, both part of the broader Mouton investment stable of companies that the foundation’s pa­­triarch built al­most from scratch. To investors, it’s a windfall. To the family, it’s “legacy philanthropy”. 

And to South Africa, if it works, it could be the largest injection of private capital into public-­benefit education the country has ever seen.

Curro will no longer have shareholders demanding quarterly earnings growth. Instead, all surpluses will be funnelled into bursaries, school expansion, and subsidising fees for lower-income learners. Think Bishops or St Stithians, but scaled to nearly 200 schools across the country.

Hidden risks of for-profit schooling

The “donation” framing also draws attention to the pitfalls of keeping schools as profit-chasing assets. Earlier this month, Curro announced what looked like a R500-million investment from Nedbank. But CEO Cobus Loubser was clear: it wasn’t a new injection for classrooms or tech.

“The Nedbank debt is part of a parcel of R2.4-billion that we refinanced earlier this year,” he told Daily Maverick on a post-interim results interview call, hours after the purchase offer (donation) was made public.

“It’s not specifically marked for digitisation or for a classroom or for a field, but part of a broader parcel to replace debt that was in the organisation and that was due for repayment at the end of this year and then next year.”

In other words, those half-a-billion headlines were more about shifting repayment terms, and less about expanding access to learners. In reality, Curro shed more than 1,000 learners year on year (down to 71,749 from 72,758 in the first half of 2024) as the macro-­economic pressures started making this particular brand of private schooling less attainable for middle-income South Africans.

Despite the downturn, Loubser was upbeat about the outcome. “We’ve replaced and refinanced that on very attractive terms, and we’ve had great support from the banks,” he said.

But the episode underlines the hidden risks of for-profit schooling: schools forced to borrow heavily not for new classrooms, but to keep shareholder obligations in check.

If the Mouton offer succeeds, Curro would be free of that dynamic. Without shareholders to satisfy, debt can be managed solely for sustainability, not return. 

It reframes education as a public benefit, not a balance-sheet liability.

Meridian splits the difference

Perhaps the clearest evidence of this new model’s potential lies in Curro’s Meridian Schools, a joint venture with Old Mutual aimed at low-fee communities.

Meridian has been a financial headache for years, dragged down by expensive shareholder loans with punitive interest rates. But after refinancing those loans with conventional bank debt, the division turned profitable in the first half of 2025 – posting R19-million in recurring headline earnings compared with a R12-million loss in the same period last year.

“Meridian was a struggling kind of enterprise, but it was burdened by a series of shareholder loans with a significant coupon rate,” Loubser explains. 

“Last year we repaid some of those loans, capitalised portions of it, and refinanced much of that with conventional bank debt. As a result, the interest cost in its income statement is substantially lower, and that explains the improvement in that particular division.” He also credited community buy-in. 

“Overall, it’s done well. We’ve invested in sites, in the experience, and in the facilities, and I think it’s been well received by parent communities.”

For Mouton, Meridian is proof of concept. “I think it will just affect them positively, especially the Meridian schools which are in even lower-fee private school markets where you reach more learners,” he said. “That is definitely an opportunity to roll out more of these schools.”

If Meridian can thrive without punitive debt, then Curro freed from profit pressures might be able to scale this model into rural and township markets where state schools are collapsing under demand.

The Mzansi education paradox

Why does any of this matter? Because South Africa’s education system is a national emergency dressed up as a budget line. 

The country spends heavily, nearly 6% of GDP, on basic education, yet outcomes are disastrous.

• 85% of schools lack science labs.
• Nearly 1,000 have no sports facilities.
• Thousands still rely on unsafe pit latrines.
• Public spending per learner actually fell 3% between 2017 and 2022.

Meanwhile, rapid urbanisation is flooding provinces like Gauteng and the Western Cape with new learners. Gauteng alone absorbs more than 100,000 annually, leading to perennial backlogs in Grade 1 and Grade 8 placements. Teacher-to-learner ratios stretch from 1:31 in public schools to 1:16 in private.

Since taking office at the dawn of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s GNU, Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube has been calling for private sector partnerships. 

“The scale of our challenges demands that government, business, civil society, communities and schools themselves act together as co-owners of the system.”

A closer study of her public addresses finds that she avoids saying “private schools”, politically aware of how loaded the phrase is.

That’s what makes Curro’s transformation so intriguing: it sidesteps ideological fights by framing the largest private school network as a public benefit organisation.

Building beyond bursaries

The Mouton vision isn’t just about bursaries, though those will expand dramatically. It’s about breaking the commercial logic that has limited private education to suburbs and semi-urban middle classes.

It’s a provocative idea: using private sector efficiency and governance structures, but deploying them like a public good. Imagine a Curro campus in a township or rural village, funded not by profit but by reinvestment. 

In principle, the model could bend South Africa’s distorted education map back towards equity.

That logic dovetails with the government’s own strategy for involving the private sector in education: public-private partnerships (PPPs).

Gwarube has been equally deliberate not to frame PPPs as privatisation. Instead, she has cast them as collaborations designed to extend the state’s limited capacity. 

“This is not about outsourcing government’s responsibility,” she has said, “but rather about aligning capacity, pooling resources, and combining expertise so that we deliver better results together than any one of us could deliver alone.”

The government’s call is for what it terms a “step-change investment” from private entities. But that doesn’t just mean building a sports field here or a lab there. 

The invitation extends to curriculum development, teacher training and skills programmes – areas designed to align the education system more closely with the economy’s needs.

Yet there is a caveat. Contributions must align with the strategic priorities of the Department of Basic Education (DBE). “Pre-determined programmes that do not align with our key priorities” create disjointed and ineffective projects, Gwa­­rube warned.

This tension sits at the heart of the PPP model. The state desperately needs private innovation and resources, but it is determined not to cede control of educational policy. Partners are invited to invest and innovate, but on the government’s terms.

The success of the model depends on whether the DBE can craft a regulatory environment that is attractive enough to bring in real capital, while ensuring equity and systemic improvement remain the goals.

Subsidy model

Beyond broad PPPs, the government has another lever: subsidies for independent schools. But these subsidies come with strict conditions. To qualify, an independent school must:

• Be officially registered for at least one year.
• Be registered as a non-profit entity.
• Charge fees no more than 2.5 times the provincial average estimate per learner (PAEPL).

Subsidies are then allocated on a five-point sliding scale, inversely related to school fees. The lowest-fee schools are eligible for the highest support, up to 60% of PAEPL. At the other end of the scale, schools charging closer to the 2.5x cap are only eligible for a 15% subsidy.

For years, this mechanism has been out of reach for corporate players such as Curro. As a for-profit chain, it simply didn’t qualify. Its high-fee model at most campuses excluded it even further.

But under the proposed structure, Curro would tick two of the three boxes: it would be an NPC and it would be independent. That could make entire segments of Curro’s portfolio, particularly the Meridian schools, eligible for state subsidies for the first time.

A R7.2-billion private donation doesn’t just transform Curro’s governance. It potentially unlocks public money that was previously off-limits, amplifying the impact.

The combination of PPP policy and the subsidy model exposes the stakes. The government is open to private collaboration, but is wary of policy capture. Corporate South Africa is willing to engage but doesn’t want to throw good money after bad. And families desperate for quality schooling often don’t care about ideological boundaries, just whether their child gets a fair shot.

“This will still be private schools,” Mouton said, “but a school that does not have shareholders and is not a for-profit institution. 

“So all the profits you make will be reinvested in furthering your public benefit goal of education.”

Stability from the top down

The Mouton family is also not proposing a management overhaul. Loubser, who has guided Curro through both debt refinancing and Meridian’s turnaround, will remain in charge if the deal succeeds.

“Our core mission and our purpose is to educate nearly 72,000 learners in our corridors, in our classrooms, on our sports fields, and to do the best we can for them and their families and with our staff,” he said. “So really this is a proposed change in ownership that has no impact whatsoever on the day-to-day operations of Curro.”

Continuity, in other words, is part of the philanthropic model.

Even with shareholder approval, court sanction, and regulatory green lights, execution will matter. Running schools without profit motives doesn’t remove the hard economics of salaries, infrastructure and debt. Nor does it instantly equalise opportunity.

But if Meridian’s turnaround is a hint, and if the Nedbank refinancing is a caution, then Curro’s shift may mark a rare moment in South African education: a pathway where private-sector scale, philanthropic intent and public benefit converge.

For once, perhaps, a corporate “deal” really might be a donation. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.