Protesting university students now want matric pupils to join their strike.
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Live television images showed a few of the protesting students kicking the shields of riot police as they tried to storm the assembly building in Cape Town.
Students from the University of the Witwatersrand protesting against fee increases threatened to beat up journalists on Tuesday. They have organised themselves into protest groups at universities around the country, in a few cases shutting down entire campuses and surrounding public roads.
Many protesting students have taken their demonstration outside campus, and online, after the council cancelled a feedback meeting over the decision to suspend fee hikes for 2016.
Students at Stellenbosch University have been lobbying for more classes to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, the language of the former apartheid government.
“We have the poorest of the poor students at this university”.
Wits announced on 17 October that it would suspend a planned 10.5 per cent increase in fees, after several days of demonstrations and blockading of entrances to the Johannesburg campus, which forced the suspension of lectures.
Despite all of this orchestrated violence, no amount of tear gas or stun grenades could stop the fire of connectedness I know many of us felt last night standing next to brothers and sisters of all races against what is clearly a manifestation of a deep-rooted evil.
Opposition leader Musi Maimmane has called on Zuma and Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande to address the students.
“The management of universities must open up legitimate channels for discussion and dialogue over these matters, and not allow matters to deteriorate, often due to lack of understanding and knowledge of the situation and spurred by poor communication”. Tensions have boiled over to the point where management at the University of Cape Town went as far as applying (and being granted) an interdict against the #FessMustFall hashtag.
The government should continue funding higher education as it is, because the NSFAS [National Student Financial Aid Scheme] is doing well in ensuring that students get educated.
Hundreds of disgruntled Tuks students formed a mass protest against steep education fees at the University of Pretoria (UP) on Wednesday morning, forcing the university into lock-down.
A survey has found that students not only feel the cost of tertiary education is too high but that the government’s economic policies will not create sufficient growth to create employment for graduates.
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The finance minister is expected to deliver the national medium-term budget from parliament at 1200 GMT.
