Bowing to politics of spectacle

I do not pretend that mine is an impartial voice, and I recognise that the story of the student protests will only be fully explained in the years to come.

I have stressed the legitimacy of the struggle of the student protesters for lower or no fees. I stand by this view.

Fee increases were occasioned by a declining per capita subsidy to universities.

This priced university education outside the affordability of not only the working but also the middle classes. University executives have known for some time that this is not sustainable, but government has not been responsive to their concerns.

The student protests changed this and brought to an end this complacency. As I have suggested previously, “the students achieved in 10 days what vice-chancellors had been trying to do for 10 years”.

Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the current round of protests has been the propensity to violence and arson. Some analysts of the movement – Jane Duncan in particular – have suggested the violence is a result of police and security action.

But this is a classic case of empirical facts not being allowed to stand in the way of the analyst’s conclusion.

Let me demonstrate the fallacy of this conclusion. In January 2016, a small group of students disrupted our registration process. They were violent and threatened staff and students. When negotiations failed to resolve the issue, we brought in private security.

The decision was opposed by a small group of liberal and left-leaning academics although it was supported by the vast majority of academics. Once the conflict stabilised, we withdrew the security.

At the beginning of the second term, some protesting students, many from other universities, tried to disrupt the academic programme. Again, students and staff were threatened and assaulted. Private security was brought in. This repeated itself three or four times during the year, although we did not lose any academic time. We did have a bus burnt (the fire was started with students on it) in February, and there were multiple attempts to burn down buildings, including libraries.

The fact to note, however, is that none of this happened as a result of the presence of private security, or the police. In fact, neither private security nor police were present. Instead, they were brought in as a result of the arson or disruptions.

How then were selected social scientists of good standing able to arrive at a conclusion in violation of the empirical facts?

The answer emanates from their overtly ideological approach to the protests. The conclusions had been arrived at even prior to their analysis. What was also shocking was the implicit condoning of violence by this small group of scholars.

They often claimed they were not partial to the violence, but their complicity was evident both in their failure to publicly condemn the violence and in their deliberate misrepresentations of events.

What they refused to recognise is that until violence is rejected, both in rhetoric and in practice, there is no moral legitimacy in the demand that a public institution should withdraw security.

The same could be asked of some NGOs and groups of progressive lawyers, all of whom seemed to have suspended their moral or even strategic political judgments in their representations of some students.

Needless to say, the court ruled in favour of the university in many of the cases brought against it. But in which moral universe can progressive lawyers justify continuously bringing legal cases against the university to prevent it from hosting examinations and determining the sentiments of its student body and university community?

How could progressives be party to attempts to shut down examinations, or be complicit in a project to advance a political agenda that advocates there should be “no education if there is no free education”?

How can one be willing to sacrifice so many innocent lives and then claim to be a supporter of the poor and marginalised?

These are hard questions that “progressive” lawyers and activists must ask themselves when they suspend judgment of the tactics deployed by sections of the student movement in this round of protests.

I must hasten to state, the vast majority of academics have been unquestionably critical of the violence and largely supportive of the continuation of the academic programme. On calling in private security, I visited each faculty to engage staff and the vast majority recognised that, however unpalatable, this was a decision that had to be made.

My reflections on the behaviour and strategies of left-leaning academics and progressives is not meant to target them unfairly. Rather, it is done to robustly confront their ideas and to demonstrate that their failure to condemn violence could literally undermine the goal of free education itself.

Their narrative of an ascendant, repressed social movement and a hostile management is also not accurate. Almost all of us agree on the goal of free education.

The dispute is how to get there and what the trade-offs should be.

Another feature that consolidated itself in the current round of student protests is the increasingly factionalised nature of the movement. At the height of the protests in 2015, student protesters numbered tens of thousands. This time, at the height of the protests at Wits, protesters numbered less than a thousand and even that is magnanimous.

Given this, it is appalling that the small left-leaning and liberal academic cohort argued against resuming the academic programme. It suggests they were more interested in being responsive to political commissars than to ordinary student voices, especially the poor, who do not have the luxury of sacrificing the academic year.

One feature striking about this round of protests has been our attempt to use mediators to broker a solution. This failed.

Understanding why is important. A small faction , essentially taking instructions from an outside political party which called for the complete shutdown of universities, was not in a position to accede to a resolution. In fact, given that it was a very small minority (it had not won a single seat in a recent student leadership election), it served its strategic interest to effectively play a politics of spectacle.

The most dramatic example of this “spectacle” was at a peace rally at a church in Braamfontein. Initially, when the idea of the rally was broached with us by some in the academic union, we cautioned against it. We suggested such an event was at risk of being hi-jacked. But not to have gone would have led to us being perceived as hostile to a solution. So we attended – after all, the students had publicly called for such an engagement.

But after a few minutes, an EFF student leader, Vuyani Pambo, took the podium and in flamboyant language demanded the meeting could not continue with my presence. Suddenly the atmosphere changed.

A small group of students surrounded me, swearing and issuing verbal abuse, and took over the meeting. The organisers were paralysed and the academic left who supported the movement cowed in silence.

The mainstream press loved the spectacle, as did embedded Daily Vox journalists.

Pambo, to be fair, indicated he did not want violence and asked students to allow me to leave. But the event had morphed from a multistakeholder peace rally into a student meeting. A student leader from a faction with minimal support effectively took control of the political narrative, while those in the majority were outmanoeuvred.

This was to play out time after time in this round of protests. It paralysed mediation attempts and effectively held the institution hostage. In this context, the only solution was to secure the campus through police and private security, and to proceed with the academic programme.

The failed peace rally reinvigorated the protests. Protesters broke into lectures and tests, and some even tore test scripts.

Police disbursed the protesters, opening fire with rubber bullets, and some students were injured. The police action is currently being investigated by the Ipid. Thereafter, an uneasy calm returned to campus, the lecture schedule was completed, and the examinations were started.

Two weeks into the exams, after Mcebo Dlamini had been released, student leaders called for a negotiated resolution. Within days, an agreement was reached in which the examinations were allowed to proceed.

A lesson from these events is that it is rational for smaller factions to emphasise the politics of spectacle, for it is the only way they can control the political narrative.

It is worth noting that this strategy was perhaps best perfected by the Nazis in the Weimar Republic in the ’20s.

The politics of spectacle has been accompanied by an astonishing duplicity among some student leaders. Many claimed publicly that the management was not willing to meet them, yet they had personally met with myself and other executives. Many who interacted with me face-to-face were utterly charming and respectful, but on Twitter they engaged in the most virulent, extreme sort of fashion which was frankly typically of far-right behaviour.

A few who had called for a boycott of lectures and exams privately approached executive managers and asked to write their papers in secret. This kind of duplicity should be of particular concern to all. It suggests some of the prominent leaders among this new generation of activists are displaying behavioural traits typical of the most venal of the current politicians.

And astonishingly, this behaviour has been defended by academics, politically active parents, some lawyers and even civil society activists. But these activists had forgotten that if left unchecked, these behaviour patterns could generalise themselves across society. One only has to remember how the politics of spectacle in the ANC Youth League, or the corruption and opportunism of Jacob Zuma and his faction, generalised themselves across the ANC, parliament and other state structures.

If student protesters and their academic and other allies continue to pursue maximalist agendas, two scenarios exist.

The first is that the implementation of the maximalist policy agenda implodes the economy as it did in Venezuela and deepens the political and social crisis.

The alternative is that, as in some countries in the rest of the continent, the government concedes on free education, does not make the concomitant investment in universities, and the institutions disintegrate as a result.

Societies can only be transformed by policies rooted in the realities of the world as it exists, not a world we wish existed. This is a lesson that progressives have forgotten in the past, and it is urgent that they internalise it today. Without this, South Africa’s universities and society are doomed.

Professor Adam Habib is vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand. This is an edited extract of his article on Daily Maverick