Only those profiting from public-service corruption will deny that the South African government of the day has, like Franz Fanon’s black bourgeoisie, become a company of impatient profiteers who have neglected engagements on bread and land issues.Fortunately for those negatively affected, the rising #FeesMustFall movement has singlehandedly removed any speculation about the capacity of South African society to resist and form multi-sectoral alliances towards transformative social change.
Earlier this year Tshwane University of Technology student protests against unfair allocations of National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) loans rose to the national agenda.
Subsequently in May Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande instituted a forensic investigation premised on evidence of corruption regarding NSFAS loans.
But before a report had been issued tertiary fee increases were announced.
In response, students throughout the country rose up under the #FeesMustFall movement and with youthful bravado asked the government awunyi perhaps?
Most of these students were not yet born when Nelson Mandela occupied the high office at the Union Buildings to deliver the promised “better life for all”.
Their call is for the government to deliver to their parents the promise of free quality education. They are in effect refusing to be indebted before they attain the education promised to them, like their counterparts in the United States where student loan debt is the only form of consumer debt that has grown since the 2008 global economic crisis.
Sadly, the students affected most by high tertiary fees in South Africa come from either squalid urban ghettos, rural areas or the precarious, debt-sustained black middle class. Most of them have struggled under seemingly impossible economic, social and household conditions to graduate from high school with university exemption.
Those who succeed have not celebrated as they are faced with the reality of exorbitant higher education fees, for which they depend on either NSFAS, private bank loans or bursaries.
Most tertiary funds for poor students are administered under the corruptible NSFAS, whose capacity to recover student loan debt has decreased from R636-million in 2010 to R247.5-million this year.
The peculiarity of the #FeesMustFall movement has been its intersectionality. Suddenly, students who drive to campus in the latest German SUVs and those who endure days without food have been in solidarity against classist and exclusive demands of higher education.
For the first time since 1994 South Africans across race, class and gendered social positions are united en masse against a condition affecting black students the most.
The capacity of this moment to strategically transform South African society depends solely on the ability of the student movement and its sympathisers to realise that the struggle against race-based access to education is but an aspect of the broader South African decolonisation project.
Reason follows that if the basis of the colonial project was resource exploitation by means of racial segregation, the logic of the decolonisation project must be that the redistribution of land and other resources in a racially equitable manner is primary.
Key to effective strategic change is the redistribution of South African resources in an equitable manner.
As in Fanon’s “wretched”, for the South African black majority “the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity...”
If the student’s movement is to have strategic impact, it must interrogate the relationship between post-apartheid resource redistribution and the government’s failure to provide free quality higher education.
South Africa is the site of the biggest global platinum production, and one of the richest nations in gold, diamonds, coal and base metals.
Overall, the country is estimated to have the fifth-largest mining sector globally.
However, in spite of the massive mineral wealth of the country, communal benefit from these resources is hindered by collusive relationships between traditional leaders, government officials and mining companies – at the expense of poor black communities.
The implications are that the post-apartheid racial patterns of resource distribution maintain and reflect apartheid-era constructs.
One of the results is that black families are unable to afford quality education for themselves and their children.
Another is that the parents and relatives of the majority within the #FeesMustFall movement continue to live in Bantustans with little to no structural power to resist the continued exploitation of national resources at their doorsteps.
Post-apartheid Bantustans throughout the country are the sites of multi-billion rand mining activities which expose black communities to diseases, drought, forced relocation, excavations of ancestral graves, and sometimes death threats for those who resist.
South Africa’s national resources, if equitably managed and distributed, are not just adequate to provide free quality education.
Their abundance can ensure delivery of “a better life for all” as pledged by the ANC in ‘94.
While the #FeesMustFall movement has the attention of the country and the world, history will define it by the questions it asked, the demands it made, and the strategic impact of those demands on the lives of the citizens of the country.
Philile Ntuli is a researcher with the Rural Woman’s Action Research programme at the Centre for Law and Society, University of Cape Town.
Resource distribution underlies fees upheaval
Fortunately for those negatively affected, the rising #FeesMustFall movement has singlehandedly removed any speculation about the capacity of South African society to resist and form multi-sectoral alliances towards transformative social change.
Earlier this year Tshwane University of Technology student protests against unfair allocations of National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) loans rose to the national agenda.
Subsequently in May Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande instituted a forensic investigation premised on evidence of corruption regarding NSFAS loans.
But before a report had been issued tertiary fee increases were announced.
In response, students throughout the country rose up under the #FeesMustFall movement and with youthful bravado asked the government awunyi perhaps?
Most of these students were not yet born when Nelson Mandela occupied the high office at the Union Buildings to deliver the promised “better life for all”.
Their call is for the government to deliver to their parents the promise of free quality education. They are in effect refusing to be indebted before they attain the education promised to them, like their counterparts in the United States where student loan debt is the only form of consumer debt that has grown since the 2008 global economic crisis.
Sadly, the students affected most by high tertiary fees in South Africa come from either squalid urban ghettos, rural areas or the precarious, debt-sustained black middle class. Most of them have struggled under seemingly impossible economic, social and household conditions to graduate from high school with university exemption.
Those who succeed have not celebrated as they are faced with the reality of exorbitant higher education fees, for which they depend on either NSFAS, private bank loans or bursaries.
Most tertiary funds for poor students are administered under the corruptible NSFAS, whose capacity to recover student loan debt has decreased from R636-million in 2010 to R247.5-million this year.
The peculiarity of the #FeesMustFall movement has been its intersectionality. Suddenly, students who drive to campus in the latest German SUVs and those who endure days without food have been in solidarity against classist and exclusive demands of higher education.
For the first time since 1994 South Africans across race, class and gendered social positions are united en masse against a condition affecting black students the most.
The capacity of this moment to strategically transform South African society depends solely on the ability of the student movement and its sympathisers to realise that the struggle against race-based access to education is but an aspect of the broader South African decolonisation project.
Reason follows that if the basis of the colonial project was resource exploitation by means of racial segregation, the logic of the decolonisation project must be that the redistribution of land and other resources in a racially equitable manner is primary.
Key to effective strategic change is the redistribution of South African resources in an equitable manner.
As in Fanon’s “wretched”, for the South African black majority “the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity...”
If the student’s movement is to have strategic impact, it must interrogate the relationship between post-apartheid resource redistribution and the government’s failure to provide free quality higher education.
South Africa is the site of the biggest global platinum production, and one of the richest nations in gold, diamonds, coal and base metals.
Overall, the country is estimated to have the fifth-largest mining sector globally.
However, in spite of the massive mineral wealth of the country, communal benefit from these resources is hindered by collusive relationships between traditional leaders, government officials and mining companies – at the expense of poor black communities.
The implications are that the post-apartheid racial patterns of resource distribution maintain and reflect apartheid-era constructs.
One of the results is that black families are unable to afford quality education for themselves and their children.
Another is that the parents and relatives of the majority within the #FeesMustFall movement continue to live in Bantustans with little to no structural power to resist the continued exploitation of national resources at their doorsteps.
Post-apartheid Bantustans throughout the country are the sites of multi-billion rand mining activities which expose black communities to diseases, drought, forced relocation, excavations of ancestral graves, and sometimes death threats for those who resist.
South Africa’s national resources, if equitably managed and distributed, are not just adequate to provide free quality education.
Their abundance can ensure delivery of “a better life for all” as pledged by the ANC in ‘94.
While the #FeesMustFall movement has the attention of the country and the world, history will define it by the questions it asked, the demands it made, and the strategic impact of those demands on the lives of the citizens of the country.
Philile Ntuli is a researcher with the Rural Woman’s Action Research programme at the Centre for Law and Society, University of Cape Town.
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