Setting an example
Members of the Rhodes University support staff are on strike after weeks of a wage dispute with management, which has included a similar stay-away, as well as several go-slows and peaceful marches. The trash left in front of the main administration building, while regrettable, is no where near the mayhem we’re used to seeing during other protests including those at Rhodes.
We are all too aware of most protest actions in South Africa. There are fiery speeches, toyi-toying, handing over of memoranda and often runs-in with law-and-order officers, as protesters burn tyres, overturn rubbish bins, and in some cases stone cars and passers-by as well as smearing public buildings with faeces.
The staff at Rhodes University have done none of this because their quarrel is with management, and not with the whole town. Instead, their union representatives have engaged Rhodes University management along the parameters set out in our Constitution, and according to the law. As just as they feel their grievances to be, they have not decided that the whole of Grahamstown must stop functioning and whoever is shopping at Pick n Pay or doing banking at Absa must be an enemy who must be abused, intimidated or roughed up.
The Rhodes staff have also engaged one of their shop stewards to write an opinion column (see elsewhere in today’s paper) in which they have laid out their grievances against management and how they think the wage dispute can be resolved. The opinion takes no prisoners and does not paint RU management in bright lights. But the support staff have not criticised Grocott’s Mail for publishing other stories, either. We must take a positive lesson from this protest action. For too long, a narrative has developed that the only thing those with power and resources listen to is violence. That explains why even the #FeesMustFall protests at university campuses around South Africa have ended in violence, injury and arrests for serious vandalism, intimidation and destruction of public property.
It’s not like those who throw stones and set up violent pickets do not have alternatives. The ultimate option for those who are sick and tired of SA’s prevailing political economy is to change it.
The RU support staff are organised and know what they want. If they think that the strike action will not achieve their ultimate goal, they have a collective responsibility to vote into political office those who support their cause.
Most issues of inequality, job loses, unemployment, grinding poverty and landlessness are closely linked in South Africa. Therefore, if people can organise to burn private vehicles and shut down the CBD to force public officials to take water to their ward, they surely can also organise to kick the said public officials out of power and elect those they think can deliver on promises made.
We must not pretend that South Africa is an equal and prosperous democracy.
However, we must also reject nihilist violence, because this only begets more violence.