Student Uprisings across universities are a clear message that radical economic transformation and free education can no longer be postponed!
The student protests in campuses across the country deserve our unreserved and unconditional support. The protests are a clear message to the ANC government that it is high time that it matches its commitment to free, quality public education to reality.
These protests are a result of the state caving in to corrosive neoliberal policies, rampant privatisation and the commodification of basic services in every facet of our society. Education is being commodified and this is what our heroines and heroes protesting today are resisting! This is a symptom of the failure of the liberation project and a betrayal of the promises for radical economic transformation and justice.
Accordingly government can't hypocritically express shock and pledge sympathy with the demands of the protesting students when it is embracing neoliberal approaches to development that are the real cause of the current students’ uprisings.
The fundamental reasons behind this uprising is that South African university funding has been declining and is today below the average of African countries and trails way behind that of its economic peers. The demand of a broad-based economy and human resources to support a new growth path demands that we spend more and not less on higher education.
The University Vice Chancellors can't solve this problem; the government must embrace appropriate macro economic policies that will release resources for development. Convening a meeting a meeting with Vice Chancellors is not going to provide any solution. What this situation demands is an urgent Cabinet meeting to embrace a new radical macroeconomic stance capable of releasing resources to provide meaningful subsidies to students. That's the meaning of radical economic transformation, as opposed to the current austerity macroeconomic stance and neoliberal programmes. NAFSA and the whole SETA system are wholly inadequate and corrupted.
Our education system is not only unaffordable, differentiated according to race and class but it also funnels many young people prematurely out of schools and universities into the labour market and
the unemployment pit.
Twenty-one years since the advent of democracy, the children of the poor black majority are still trapped in inferior education, with inadequate infrastructure and human resources. Over 70% of the
matriculation pass rate is accounted for by just 11% of schools, with former white schools dominating the scale.
Approximately 50% of the learners in high schools exit the education system between Grade 10 and 12. These youths are thrown into a precarious life and effectively handed over on a silver platter to brutal labour brokers in the mining sector, retail, cleaning, hospitality and private security industries in this country.
The challenge of drug and crime infested communities cannot be divorced from how the post-apartheid government has neglected the radical transformation of the education system and the economy, thus effectively relegating thousands of young people to living on the margins.
The students’ struggle cannot be separated from the struggles of their mothers and fathers who reel under capitalist super-exploitation in the factories, mines and farms.
There is an umbilical cord that ties the struggles of students at Fort Hare, Wits, Rhodes, UCT, CPUT and others with the struggle of mineworkers for a living wage and the struggles of their peers against the ruthless post apartheid workplace regime where racism and insecurity is the order of the day.
As it stands, there are over 8.4 million South Africans who are currently out of jobs and completely excluded from the country’s economic life.
There is a direct connection between university struggles and the rising youth unemployment – a problem so deep-seated that even the false solutions such as the youth wage subsidy have proven an unforgivable failure.
In a country where the median wage rate is R3033 and the workers’ share of the national income has declined drastically over the past twenty-one years, the rising cost of education becomes a gatekeeping mechanism that preserves these institutions, especially historically white institutions, as bastions of privilege.
The protests are an indictment of the post-1994 government and a reminder of its blatant failure to utilise the political power vested in it through popular support to effect radical and fundamental change.
We salute the bravery, heroism, resilience and sacrifice of the students who continue to wield a flag against neoliberal capitalist education. We urge the students to march on and unify across the political spectrum and weave these struggles together to take the ANC government to task on its glaring failure to transform the economy and arrest the assault on black working class living standards since 1994.
Issued by Zwelinzima Vavi, 20 October 2015
