Political Bureau calls for a moratorium on fee increases by universities and colleges for 2016
23 October 2015
The South African Communist Party (SACP) Political Bureau affirms the legitimacy of the present student struggles against exorbitant university fee increases. It is overwhelmingly the deserving children of the workers and the poor who cannot afford the high cost of access to universities and colleges, who are being excluded on financial grounds.
The SACP therefore makes a call for a moratorium on university and college fee increases for 2016.
The moratorium must be used to create a climate in which all stake-holders are able to urgently address a sustainable way forward towards the progressive realisation of free quality education for the children of the workers and poor who are being discriminated on a class basis by universities and colleges exercising their institutional autonomy. Fees are not set and increased by government.
The problem of student funding highlighted by student mobilisation with active participation of our Progressive Youth Alliance underlines that the prevailing model of institutional autonomy and the manner in which universities use it to exclude the poor and oppose transformation has reached its limits. The SACP calls on the government to initiate a legislative process to review the Higher Education, Technical and Vocational Training Acts to regulate institutional autonomy and ensure more effective public accountability.
The constitutional principle of academic freedom must not be conflated with institutional autonomy. Neither must institutional autonomy be used to lock-out the role of the state in advancing the broader public interest.
The SACP congratulates the students for defending their struggles against organisations and individuals who are seeking to hijack their struggle for narrow party political and sectarian interests. Let us ensure that this major countrywide student mobilisation creates momentum for advancing towards a more egalitarian society, and does not result only in sectoral gains at the expense of the wider working class and poor.
Progressive student and worker struggles must be mutually reinforcing. The students affected by financial exclusion are the sons and daughters of low-paid, outsourced and casualised workers, and the unemployed. In this context, the SACP congratulates the overwhelming majority of students who have consistently conducted themselves in a disciplined manner since the beginning of the mobilisation.
Those minority elements who wittingly or unwittingly are playing into the hands of provocateurs are not interested in the genuine content of the struggle and must be isolated. Likewise, the SACP calls on police-men and -women to act with maximum restraint in often difficult circumstances caused by deliberate provocation.
The SACP agrees with the outsourced and casualised university workers who have correctly linked the struggle against their conditions with that of the students.
As a country let us not ignore the broader social and economic context and its relation to the situation at hand. On the one hand a doubling of college and university student enrolments since 1994 and a massive increase of comprehensive student funding and support by the state. On the other hand, a persisting capitalist economic crisis and a society characterised by crisis levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty. These are structural and systemic issues, which call on our liberation alliance to move faster in advancing the second more radical phase of our democratic transformation.
Statement issued by the SACP, 23 October 2015
