The police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades in clashes at the Wits University in Johannesburg this Tuesday.
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Student medics at Wits told AFP that they had treated at least 20 injured people.
Nzimande on Monday announced there would be no fee increase for students whose parents earned less than R600,000 a year for the 2017 academic year. President Jacob Zuma previous year put fee increases for 2016 on hold following weeks of student protests, and in January established a committee to evaluate the viability of free education.
Protesters had thrown stones at security guards outside a main campus building.
Classes were cancelled for the remainder of the week at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand – known as “Wits” – while academic activities were also suspended Wednesday at the University of Pretoria’s main campus, and the University of Cape Town.
“We can’t allow police to bully us, all we want is to study and they are denying us that right, they should leave us alone to study”, said one the students who sat defiantly in the ground.
“To subsidise these students would require taking funding from the poor to support cheaper higher education for the wealthy, which is not justifiable in a context of inequality in our country”.
After news that the Education minister will be pushing through “fee adjustments” for 2017-up to eight percent-student president Kefentse Mkhari declared: “Comrades, we aren’t going to entertain that eight percent”. Students fought running battles with police and university security for the greater part of the day at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Despite a huge police presence of police‚ students still managed to disrupt some classes.
A student at the scene who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety said many students had been injured Wednesday when police fired at them, but were rushed inside campus for treatment.
Classes were also suspended Wednesday at the University of Cape Town because of security concerns. In 2015, the government froze university fees for the current year after some of the biggest student protests in South Africa since the end of white minority rule in 1994.
Police presence has been heavy in since the early morning as a massive cleanup operation got under way in the debris-strewn campus, and workers could be seen putting up scaffolding as repairs to the numerous broken windows and other infrastructure began.
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The Executive Committee of Council will meet on today, 21 September, nine days earlier than they had announced previously, and the university will communicate further thereafter.
