Long-term impact of student protests still to pan out

BENJI SHULMAN

As I arrived, big screen TVs in the security lobby showed the EFF members being thrown out of the House for demanding that the budget speech underway, be suspended so that MPs could address the concerns of the students gathered outside. 

I signed the visitors register and crossed an alleyway heading toward the parliamentary building. To my right, 50 metres up the road, I could see the crowd of students. They were chanting: “We want Blade! We want Blade!”

The police cordon seemed thin and was being pushed back a few metres at a time by the jostling crowd. Eventually it buckled, and the students swarmed toward Parliament. Behind me riot police began gearing themselves up, donning helmets and moving into position.

I retreated back into the security lobby, along with a number of journalists, parliamentary staff and government officials, as young people swirled around the building. Soon after that the boom of stun grenades signalled that police were driving the crowds out of the Parliamentary precinct and back into the street.

In that moment, South African student politics changed, starting a new chapter in its history.

The student-led #FeesMustFall campaign at Parliament was unlike anything we have seen on a campus in 20 years. Its origins, however, were in faraway University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg.

Protests about fees will be familiar to anyone attending Wits in the last 10 years. Costs have been steadily rising; take, for example, the upfront fee payable upon registration. Ten years ago this was around R2 000 (less if your marks were good). It has now ballooned to about R9 000, a huge amount for the increasing population of poorer students who know that a university entrance might be their only route out of poverty.

From these desperate students there has been resistance to the annual fee increases as they struggle to pay costs, not just of the degree itself, but also for accommodation, food and text books.

These students are natural supporters of the EFF and the ANC Youth League on campus. They are also the most likely to vote in student elections, meaning the ANCYL tends to control bodies like the Student Representative Council.

It is therefore normal for the Wits SRC to protest fee increases and occasionally disrupt classes for a few days a year. The object is normally to force lower fee increases and raise additional funds for poor students.

The protests tend to be aimed at university management. This is natural since they are the students’ closest point of contact, but also because targeting, say an ANC minister, is not a good career move. A successful stint at an ANCYL-led SRC often means a foothold inside the ANC itself and nobody wants to make powerful enemies so early on.

At the University of Cape Town the situation is somewhat different as the students are largely more affluent and the ANC hasn’t been a strong political force there for some time. In its place students have taken from other traditions, such as Black Consciousness, feminism and Pan-Africanism.

Their leadership tends to organise horizontally and they make prodigious use of social media instead of deciding their course of action in traditional ANC-led committees. It was these groups that brought us the #RhodesMustFall protests earlier in the year.

Having already engaged in “warfare” against UCT management, it was inevitable that they would eventually turn to a broader target. By shifting the protest to Parliament, which then moved to (ANC headquarters) Luthuli House in Johannesburg and eventually the Union Buildings in Pretoria, they made government their focus, along with (Minister of Higher Education) Blade Nzimande and even President Jacob Zuma himself. 

#FeesMustFall has won some important early concessions but it remains to be seen what the long-term impact of the campaign will be.   

Benji Shulman is the deputy director of community relations for the South African Zionist Federation. He finished a masters degree in Geography at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2014. While at Wits he was involved with student issues and was the Senate Representative for the Post Graduate Association. He was also the former national chairman of the South African Union of Jewish