EFF STATEMENT ON VIOLENT RACISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FREE STATE
23 February 2016
The EFF condemns the University of Free State students together with their parents who unleashed mob violence against peaceful protestors who were protesting against outsourcing last night. During the rugby match, insourcing protestors, who were predominantly black staged a peaceful sit-in at the rugby match. Instead of peacefully addressing the protestors and their grievances, a group of white students and their parents stormed into the fields and beat them up, calling them animals.
The reality is that had it been white students who were protesting, the reaction was going to be different. Violence would have not been preferred on an unarmed and peaceful protest that was seeking to raise the plight of outsourced workers at UFS. White mob violence was preferred precisely because white people collectively held a view that this is the only way to address black people on picket lines, as their apartheid government did.
The University of Free State is well known for anti-black racism against black outsourced workers for whom the protests were about. In 2007, four white students shot a video of black workers whom they forced to eat food tainted with urine. Almost 8 years later, black workers who clean the university remain outsourced, in precarious labour contracts that make them cheap and easily disposable labour. This condition, the condition of their cheapness and disposability, is the what turned them a prey to racist white males who fed them urine at UFS.
The struggle for insourcing is fundamentally about the restoration of the dignity of outsourced workers who are not viewed everywhere as not part of the university which they service. These workers remain predominantly black across all campuses in the country. The protest action, which was peaceful, was about insisting that normal life in the university must not continue when the dignity of workers is not restored.
We condemn the racists and commend the students for their protest action. The EFF is in full support of their action and has with immediate effect joined the struggle in numbers to ensure that victory is attained. No form of intimidation by white racists must ever deter any freedom loving South Africans from engaging in protests to improve the lives of the dejected and condemned.
White racists do not have a monopoly over violence, they were defeated two decades ago with all the guns in their houses, combined with their brutal police and military forces. To this day, they could not stop the inevitable dawn of democracy and they shall not stop the transformation of all public institutions, including all sports codes.
We call on all South Africans of conscience to unite at UFS and support demonstrations against racism. We call on the South African police to use the widely circulating video footage and arrest all who assaulted the protestors.
Statement issued by the Economic Freedom Fighters, 23 February 2016
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