Good may yet come out of grassroots protests
THE years spent trying to secure tertiary education enjoy the curious distinction of being simultaneously the worst and best years of my life as an adult. The former was obvious then, while the latter has been with the benefit of hindsight and a longer experience of adulthood.
It was the first time I became acutely aware of income and class differences. Having grown up where everyone was largely the same, and gone to boarding schools where peers had similar life experiences, it was a shock to realise that one was actually poor. Until I secured on-the-job training with Volkswagen SA in my final year at the then Port Elizabeth Technikon, life had been a struggle.
The threat of financial exclusion always loomed and there was never enough food to eat. Don’t get me wrong. The residence’s dining hall was well stocked and the roast chicken on Sundays tasted great. But at 30c a slice of bread, there was no way the R300 my mother could afford to give me each month was going to cater for everything. But I rewarded myself with at least one Sunday meal a month at the dining hall. For the rest, we cooked for ourselves and pooled what we had, and life was bearable.
In my first year, mainly the white students, those with bursaries or TEFSA (now NSFAS) funding and the few black students who came from families with means could eat three square meals a day. By the second year, most of the white students opted to stay off campus. The large Letaba resi- dence parking lot emptied, reflecting the car-less state of black students.
As difficult as life was, these were the years that also transformed my life from youthful ambivalence and drift to a burning ambition to succeed. I could not afford to be defeated by circumstances, so success became the only option. I was not an exception. Most of us had settled into a life of constant struggle from which we would pass and move on to different struggles in the world of work.
I am reminded of this because of the events at Wits University. Some have criticised the students for the stand they have taken. For some it may be out of political self-interest, for others it may be an instance of class ambivalence, while the rest may be suffering from amnesia. Whatever the reasons are, the struggles of university students are no trivial matter.
Worrying about money and food while having to focus on your studies is stressful and debilitating. The frustration comes from a place of desperation. Dismissing their fears and concerns can only produce anger whose outcome is likely to be anarchy.
Of course, Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib is not the beginning of their problems, nor is whatever he says going to be their end. However, he is someone they can deal with as he represents the system that runs our institutions of higher learning.
The funding of higher education is a multilayered problem that is too big for institutions to take individual decisions to resolve. The fundamental question is whether free education is possible, and if it is, what should be done to realise it. If it is not, then the discussion should be about finding the best mechanisms to prevent financial exclusions altogether.
In a country in which good money is thrown at ideological flights of fancy, such as a bankrupt airline, the time has come for people to see these for what they are — wasteful nonsense. Investing an extra R5bn a year in tertiary education would yield much more return than giving it to South African Airways to waste once more.
The student protest highlighted the accelerating irrelevance of parties such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the face of evolving grassroots struggles. They appear unsure, insecure, hobbled by their traditionalism and, often, try to play catch-up in a cheesy, condescending way.
The ANC does not know how to react to mass demonstrations that are not driven by its political agenda, and are often against its vices and failures. It can no longer legitimately claim to be a “leader of the mass democratic movement” because its version thereof has lost its allure. A new form of protest politics driven by different sectors in response to difficulties experienced in the democratic era is replacing the party’s hegemony.
The DA is also caught in a time warp of its own. It has no history of protest politics and the new radicalism displayed in recent protests feels too much like anarchy when viewed through its traditional prism. It can neither officially join these protests nor lead them. Just like the ANC, but for different reasons, it also has a crisis of legitimacy looming. It has raised the issue of tertiary education funding but not in a way that linked its concerns to the struggles of students.
This tension between old and new politics is nothing new. It is generally a very good thing and in our case is but stage one of a long, fraught, political evolutionary process. The next step is an amalgamation of the struggles into a coherent political tidal wave that produces leaders and ideas from a cross-section of our society. The only question is when this will come to pass.