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President Zuma freezes 2016 university fees in South Africa

Thousands of South African university students had converged on Friday at the country’s main government complex to protest tuition increases and posing a serious challenge to Zuma.

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DW’s South Africa correspondent Thuso Khumalo said Zuma did not address the crowd directly “and that angered a lot of students”.

In a short televised statement the embattled President announced that for the next year at least, tuition costs would not change.

Zuma is meeting student leaders and professors Friday in an effort to quell the growing protests.

Police fired rubber bullets at students and journalists outside the Union Buildings just after Zuma’s brief announcement, injuring several, including an ANA reporter.

Before he spoke in a TV address, police had been using stun grenades and water cannon to stop a group of students breaking into the Union Buildings, the seat of government in Pretoria. “Otherwise we are happy our efforts have brought results”, a Wits University student said.

The tuition hikes would have gone into effect for the 2016 school year, impacting a cohort of students who are part of the “born-free” generation, coming of age after the end of white-majority rule during the Apartheid era.

Speaking after a meeting with university leaders and student representatives, Mr Zuma said that the government “understands the difficulty faced by students from poor households” and would “seek solutions that are in the best interests of the country”.

At the height of the protests, students stormed parliament in Cape Town on Wednesday, trapping lawmakers.

It was also decided that exams scheduled for next month would be pushed out to December to give students time to prepare, given many institutions have been closed for days.

Initially, fees were to go up by 10%, but the government lowered the increase to 6% before freezing the hikes for next year. We are already struggling to pay the current fees that is why we are demanding a zero percent increase,”Mahle said”.

Karabo Mary, another student, said that the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) promised South Africans free education and housing when they assumed office in 1994. However, a few students at the University of Johannesburg and the University of Western Cape complained that police used stun grenades to disperse them.

Students from Wits and the University of Johannesburg marched in their thousands through South Africa’s commercial capital on Thursday, October 22.

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There are a million South African students in further education and universities say they need higher fees in order to keep up standards and have appealed to the government to find the extra money.

Students protest during a mass demonstration on the steps of Jameson Hall at the University of Cape Town