WSU boycott to continue until demands are met

Class boycotts at two Walter Sisulu University campuses are in their third week.

Thousands of students at the tertiary institution’s Buffalo City and Ibika campuses are demanding that university management address the issue of accommodation, which is among a long list of grievances.

Only students on the Mthatha campus returned to lectures.

Student Representative Council’s (SRC) president Mxolisi Zoko said yesterday that students decided to go back to classes during a mass meeting held on the campus’s Nelson Mandela Drive learning site last week.

“We are still in ongoing negotiations with management regarding the outstanding issues,” he said.

Zoko said the reason students wanted to stop the protest was because “there had not been much teaching since the beginning of the year. Students wanted to recover the lost academic time”.

Zoko said returning to class was not a sign of giving in, “but giving the management enough time to address our issues”.

On the other side, students at the Buffalo City and Ibika campuses have made it clear that they are not going to class until all of their issues are addressed.

“We don’t want promises. We want implementation,” said Buffalo City Campus SRC member Xolelwa Sophangisa.

She said students had a mass meeting on Monday afternoon and made it clear that they were not going back to class. “Students said they could not go to classes while they do not have accommodation,” she said.

Sophangisa said the other pressing issue was the shortage of lecture-room furniture. “It isn’t exaggeration that there are students who stand on their feet throughout the lecture because there are no chairs to sit on,” she said.

She said “countless engagements we have had with the management have not yielded any positive outcomes. No agreement has been reached”.

Sophangisa said when they reported back to students during a mass meeting that management had told the SRC that they would not be able to address all the issues, “students then said they would give them enough time to fix everything that needed to be fixed before going back to classes”.

SRC secretary at the Ibika campus Butterworth Sibongiseni Mayeza said as well as the dire accommodation shortage, there was a serious shortage of lecturers.

Mayeza said they would continue to engage with management.

University vice chancellor Rob Midgley told the Dispatch last week that management of the affected campuses were engaging with the SRC to resolve the problems.

He said the biggest problem was overcrowding and a shortage of bed space, with Mthatha and Ibika campuses the most affected.

“There are some good and bad residences, but I am confident that the overwhelming majority of our private residences meet the criteria for the department of higher education and training,” he said.

Midgley said the university needed R850-million to address the challenge.

He said, if paid, the R800-million owed by students in fees could probably solve the residence backlog. “We could build 12000 beds,” he said.

Midgley said the university was in the process of finding more residence space for its students.