SACP OR Tambo supports students protests

21 October 2015

As communists in the OR Tambo District, we fully support the struggle of poor working class students who sprout from poor and mostly rural areas of OR Tambo District who are in institutions of Higher Learning who have been protesting demanding an end to fee increases and demanding Free Education in their lifetime.

Every year, institutions of Higher Learning, pitilessly exclude thousands of working class students from poor working class backgrounds. These poor working class students who have been excluded sit at home in the backyards of their rural homes with little to no prospects for a better life. The trajectory of their lives changes forever.

When the ANC government increases NSFAS funding, Institutions of Higher Learning gobble it all up by opportunistically increasing fees, thus resulting in this funding assisting fewer students than it could have managed. Some of our people are deemed to earn too much to qualify for NSFAS, but are too poor to afford fees in institutions of Higher Learning. Many working class households have a story of dashed hopes.

Student struggles are community struggles. We call on our communities to join the struggle against Fee Increases. We call on our communities to join the struggle for Free Education. As communists we have always believed that Education is not a commodity that must be auctioned to the highest bidder. Education must be universally free and transformed.

Education must be freed from the financial stranglehold of the chattering classes. Education must also be freed from the ideological stranglehold of the bourgeoisie which uses it as an instrument to produce an uncritical mass of human machines aridly trained for a job, questioning nothing but accepting anything which hegemonizes the ruling class

We say to protesting students, in the words of Oliver Tambo: “Attack, advance, give the enemy no quarter”.

Statement issued by Simthembile Mvunelo, SACP OR Tambo District District Secretary, 21 October 2015