Get with the programme

Rhoda Kadalie

There is a lot of anger in this country. Sudden outbursts of rage against colonial statues that did not bother us for decades have suddenly become symbols of oppression. The “Rhodes Must Fall” students occupy Bremner Building, which houses the university’s central administration departments, until the Rhodes statue is removed; they occupy Bremner until they are evicted. Not satisfied with the peace at the University of Stellenbosch, the “Open Stellenbosch Collective” tries to disrupt the inauguration of Vice-Chancellor Professor Wim de Villiers. The Wits Student Representative Council leader declares he admires Hitler.

Comments on the internet remind us that Hitler and apartheid are not dead. Labelling people in order to dismiss their arguments is as old as the hills and in this, apartheid has succeeded. Its very victims fling about racist epithets to dismiss rational thought.

This is not unique to South Africa. The political culture of the US is fraught with the same disease. In simplistic political parlance, Republican equals right-wing, equals evil. The Democratic Party equals left or liberal, and represents all that is good, clean and fresh tralala! This uncritical engagement with global politics is now much more complex. The distinction today is no longer between left and right, black and white, East versus West, but between open and closed societies. And even here the lines are blurred.

Our young “revolutionaries” had better get with the programme. While some of our black student leaders remain obsessed with the race industry and its specialisation in victimhood and “woundedness”, most white students work hard to get their qualifications or go abroad to sharpen their intellectual and vocational skills. These are the students who will come back to fi x our dilapidating infrastructure, such as Eskom, while our own students will join the army of the unemployed. The statistics prove my point.

I see this every day in my work. Just between UCT and the US alone, almost R1 billion is spent on student bursaries and loans. In my day, we black students had no access to bursaries. Regrettably, students waste financial assistance by refusing to knuckle down and complete their education well. South African universities should demand more from their students as they do in the US. American universities provide their students with monetary incentives to do internships in South Africa, knowing what it means to expose them to the challenges in developing countries. Our own universities deny students incentives to work within civil society organisations and the non-profit sector during holidays to try and understand the societal challenges they experience and the myriad solutions local actors find to address their problems.

Right on our doorstep are solutions to the excessive waste produced – it can be converted into electricity for poorer households; human sludge from pit latrines can be converted into high quality fertiliser to solve our food security problems; medical circumcisions are done by doctors to avert the deaths of young men going to the bush, thereby reducing HIV.

These are but a few examples of how students can apply the knowledge they acquire at university. Throwing human excrement around and demanding the destruction of statues as part of their “transformation” project will not help when they lack the critical faculties to change SA into a Silicon Valley of development from which the world can learn.