May ’68? Not even close, Wits protesters
CHILDREN, children, children. Your little protest at Wits University was quite impressive in several ways, but your long-suffering parents don’t quite get it. Was it really about an increase in fees? And what was that October 6 worker-solidarity thing you had going?
It was pure theatre to observe the attempted reference with May 68 (look it up). That protest drew in at least 20,000 students and academic staff, plus eventually 11-million workers in a solidarity strike, or about 22% of the French population at the time and saw then president Charles de Gaulle off the premises. Now that is a movement. October 6 is probably not. The Braamfontein Spruit is not the Seine and the nearest thing Joburg has to a Latin quarter to which to take the fight after hours are a handful of soiled restaurants in Melville with tables on the sidewalk. No poets there, only bourgeois hipsters with a bit of spare cash.
First, though, well done for not getting anyone killed. Everyone seems to be claiming credit for that, especially the protesters, but you have to grant that the armed and angry adults displayed an admirable degree of restraint.
In SA, that is a lot for which to be grateful. Second, congratulations on winning an agreement from management to suspend the increase in fees for next year and that there “will be no fee increments until negotiations reach an agreement”, according to a university statement. An increase of 10.5% is a lot and to register a protest makes sense. Parents, too, will be glad for the news.
Similarly, at a perfunctory reading of the outsourcing protest, it also seems righteous. It claims in its papers that when campus workers’ jobs became outsourced, the workers lost 40% of their wages and all of their benefits. You would be right if you thought that only a bean counter could construct something as wicked as that, but the slightly more contemplative intellectual would realise that the bean counter in question was told to find a way to cut costs, or someone else would. And right there is the confusing thing.
Where did vice-chancellor Adam Habib find either the authority or the gumption to defy his bosses by capitulating to students’ demands to suspend the increase in fees? Will he able to keep his word and his job? It is not his money, after all. The money belongs to Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande.
Surely those more contemplative intellectuals should have guided the protesters to march on Nzimande’s office, not Habib’s. It is not as though Wits or any of the state-supported universities have the money. Most of the money allocated in one of the world’s biggest education budgets is tied up in the truly gargantuan state bureaucracy, which is most certainly one of the biggest jobsfor-pals schemes on earth.
Perhaps the more contemplative protesters might have asked Habib just how much of his budget goes to correcting the miseducation that basic education dumps in his lap every year. They might have asked, too, about how academic staff are supposed to juggle teaching duties with the necessity to do research and publish papers, all on a noncompetitive salary.
Another weird thing is, how did the same gang of protesters resist cost-cutting efforts and then immediately switch to a protest against fee increases? Don’t they learn about economics at that school, or paradoxes? If October 6 is a real movement, and if you lot discover that the real enemy is your government, not something hatched in a Marxist analysis, we might have a revolution on our hands.
We need to know. If it is just kids’ stuff, you had better cut your hair and get a job.