The protesters expressed their solidarity with the Fees Must Fall movement, which began when members of the Student Representative Council at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa shut down the university after administrators announced a 10.5 percent tuition hike. I made it because I worked hard, but also because I somehow managed to navigate an unjust economic, political, social (read racist) system which structurally excludes most of South Africa’s youth.
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South Africa is lowish in world terms for tertiary funding. Not since the Soweto Uprising of 1976 have this many youth arisen to demand the right to quality and accessible education. This has lead to the #feesmustfall campaign and the national shutdown of universities and streets across the country. Much like Satgoor, Tsikane has watched her mother struggle to pay high university fees.
But Mantashe said there should be a time frame for achieving the goal of free education. It has been promised at each election since 1994.
This is the typical meritocratic myth that middle and upper class South Africans like to believe.
The protests in the past two weeks have illustrated the importance of this dialogue, indicating universities can not be just autonomous entities, she said. But he also urged a newly independent South Africa to recall, “if the ANC does to you what the apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the apartheid government”.
Students at the University of North West said they wanted Afrikaans not be used and imposed on students.
Students simply refused to accept Nzimande’s 6% tuition rise.
South African students want free university education.
We see you, Mr President. Demographics should shift to reflect South Africa’s composition, but programs should be crafted in ways cognizant of black South Africans’ developmental and cultural needs.
“What we have is really old, privileged institutions like your Wits, your Rhodes, your Stellenbosch, formerly white”.
Debates around transformation and inequality surfaced earlier this year when students from UCT demanded that the higher education sector be decolonized.
The students have won their demand of a 0% increase in tuition fees, with planned fee increases of up to 11.5%, at the heart of the protests.
However, the students felt that both the universities and the government were ignoring their pleas. “I think it is very healthy for us here in South Africa that we don’t stay forever”. Such funding will have to be carefully regulated to ensure the autonomy of universities from interference.
Students have felt increasingly frustrated as their hope for better education and futures are compromised by funding cuts and increased fees. “You’ve got to be able to have the resources”.
Zuma spoke at his residence near the Union Buildings where four days ago thousands of demonstrators called for a freeze on university tuition, capping more than a week of protests by the students that were the biggest since the end of apartheid. In September 2015, this violence escalated at UKZN with the targeted burning of university buildings and facilities.
Outside of the meeting, however, police fired stun guns and water cannons and students who tried to force their way into the premises. The ANC was a banner for black South Africans, a symbol of their liberation from white oppression. “Someone will Google it, and they’ll see there’s a movement happening here”.
The protests and student demands are not only about access but about the nature of higher education itself. Students took responsibility for their actions and the consequences of those actions, which further legitimized their cause. It has given them a voice and a realization of their collective power.
The real victims in South Africa are the students being bullied by a government – ironically, to promote fairness.
While the scramble for free education has opened up other national “wounds”, it has reflected the lack of redress by the government. At the 13th annual Nelson Mandela Lecture at the University of Johannesburg on October 3, renowned French economist Thomas Piketty noted that the top 10 percent of South Africans, a majority of whom are white, earn between 60 percent to 65 percent of total income-making it clear the black economic empowerment policies have failed.
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Could it be that they would need to think about how corruption is deeply embedded in white corporate South Africa?
