Vol. 29 No. 11
SAFAR 1437 l NOVEMBER 2015 A National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) member at UCT speaks to students, staff and outsourced workers at UCT on October 22. These engagements are fuelling deeper solidarity between university students, workers, academics and non-academic staffs at various higher education campuses across the whole of South Africa. What started as a revolt against massive university fee increases has become a united front of people from across the class-divide in the country as citizens confront the most unequal society on earth. This progressive movement which started on the campuses is being taken to local communities across the country, and it will have to guard against attempts to sow division in its ranks in various attempts to protect the neo-liberal status quo. Photo YUNUS OMAR
YUNUS OMAR NCE again, economic inequality has driven South Africans to the streets, reminding us of the false notion of a rainbow nation – there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Instead, university students have reminded the country that those who control the gold, paint pretty rainbows in the skies for us to chase. Events at the country’s universities over the past weeks have unnerved those in power who have merrily gone along over the past two decades turning the neoliberal noose ever tighter around our necks. Startling figures have been calculated, and have been widely circulated in all sectors of society. Since the advent of the postapartheid period, an estimated R700-billion has been lost to South Africans through corruption. Just one-tenth of that amount of money would be more than enough to fund every university student who is a victim of the continued inequality that characterises our country. Keeping in mind that we are officially the most unequal society on earth, it is little wonder that the pot is boiling over on our campuses. The myths and promises sprinkled before its citizens’
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STUDENT-WORKER SOLIDARITY SIGNALS BREAK WITH THE PAST eyes in 1994 have evaporated. A recurring rallying theme on placards and voiced at demonstrations by students at virtually every campus in the country has it that ‘our parents were sold dreams in 1994... we’ve come to tell you that we’ve woken from our sleep’. Things moved very quickly once Wits University students had started the ball rolling with their demand for a zero-per cent increase in university fees for 2016. The movement caught on like wildfire at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where, a few months ago, massive student action resulted in an acceleration of the transformation agenda, and the
highly significant action which resulted in the hated figure of imperialist Cecil John Rhodes being lifted off his pedestal and driven away unceremoniously on the back of an open truck. That campaign, named by the students as #RhodesMustFall (RMF), lost some momentum over the past months. But the solidarity momentum with Wits saw the birth of a stunning #FeesMustFall campaign, drawing on the previous RMF campaign, but independent of it. What followed is unprecedented in the post-apartheid era. Students across the country began to discuss the zero-per cent fee increase, and began to articulate a radical critique of the issues
around the promised, and foughtfor, ‘free, quality education for all’ in a post-apartheid South Africa. In a matter of days, university students began to link their struggle to the broader struggle of the most victimised persons they met on their campuses every day: people who work on the campuses but who are not members of the university staff: so-called ‘outsourced’ workers. Within days, students and campus-based outsourced workers around the country had added the demand for the insourcing of all workers, i.e. those who work at the universities should be on the payroll of those universities. Those students and workers in
Cape Town, accompanied by progressive academics and non-academic staff, were seen in historical scenes beamed around the world as they entered the precincts of Parliament to press their demands to the nation’s elected leadership inside Parliament. The EFF raised their voices inside those chambers for the Minister of Finance’s budget speech to be adjourned and for Parliament to address the students and workers. The EFF were promptly ejected. Instead, the country witnessed bizarre footage of elected parliamentarians listening to a budget speech inside while its citizens gathered outside to present their demands of a re-ordered budget to those elected officials. The country watched as students and workers moved onto the Parliamentary precincts, were smashed back, with many arrested and charged. At the Union Buildings, later that week, thousands of students and workers massed outside, winning a significant victory in the form of a presidential announcement that their first demand, that of a zero-per cent fee increase for 2016, had been agreed to. But the die has been cast for a far broader agenda: for a start, free, quality education for the disadvantaged and the working class. Student-worker solidarity flowing from this movement has the potential to disrupt the business-as-usual neo-liberal agenda. Inequality and its savage outcomes of hunger and deprivation are at the heart of the new debate. Students and workers have shown that when talking falls on deaf ears, as it has for decades, the streets are public spaces where public demands for an end to social inequality can be made, and won. #CapitalismMustFall...