Now students have had enough.
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Although the protest movement mainly involved Black students, white students also took part-the economic situation is beginning to hit for a few of them, too.
Cape Town – Hundreds of #feesmustfall students protested at the University of the Western Cape on Monday, occupying the university’s Life Science center.
The nationwide protests have continued for two weeks under the slogan “Fees Must Fall”, triggered by university plans to raise tuition fees for 2016, ranging from 10 to 50 percent.
We were outvoted, although the fee increase has been temporarily suspended thanks to the protests.
Wary of unfulfilled promises in the past‚ students at Wits University vowed to pin the government down to making a “firm commitment” on free education before letting up and finally going back to lectures‚ the Times newspaper reported. “We must state that the president’s announcement that there will be a zero percent increment really means nothing to us because we are not fighting for the zero percent increment but we are fighting for the fall of all fees”, said Rubulana.
“We do need this to come to an end”, Habib said. That’s not a hard message to decode.
In a televised interview yesterday, Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande said South Africa was “ready” to provide free education.
A South African university student has posted video online showing terrified students barricaded inside a classroom as rioters violently bashed on the doors. In what quickly began to resemble a scene out of 1976 Soweto Uprisings during apartheid South Africa, 29 students were arrested and six of them were charged with high treason. That often results in these black middle class students being inadequately funded. Instead they threw water bottles at him, and between another favoured South African expression of dissatisfaction, they booed and told him they were exhausted of waiting for his programmes and planning committees and that the #feesmustfall now.
Government funding to universities has been declining for years, from one-half of total costs in 2000 to 40 percent today.
The Youth League also put out a statement in its own name the night before, articulating the demands of the students, which no other student organisation had done before. A senior member of management told me that in 2015 Wits excluded up to 3 000 students who met our academic requirements, but could not raise the fees they needed.
This is turning Wits and other universities into de facto private institutions. Elite not on the basis of intellectual ability, but on the basis of social class. Good education for the rich and inadequate education for the poor can only divide South Africa further.
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There is also a deep cultural alienation among many young black students that isn’t often spoken about. That’s why the movement spread and that’s why the iconography touches those who have never been to the university and don’t normally care for student issues. This cultural chasm fuels the resentment of students who are struggling financially and is creating the explosive cocktail that we are now witnessing. As educational subsidies decrease, universities are unable to meet the gap in cost of instruction.
