Blade under siege
Urgent appeal to all donors
HIGHER Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande had barely concluded a joint media briefing with the national board of convocations and alumni when several students stormed into the main entrance of his department’s offices in Pretoria.
Security staff quickly closed the ground-floor entrance, but a few students were already in. Several officials tried unsuccessfully to persuade the protesters to leave.
Moments later, police officers arrived and bundled some of them into police vehicles.
The metro police blocked traffic on Francis Baard Street as SAPS members forced the students to vacate the building.
A few of them were arrested and taken to Pretoria Central police station, but later released.
Some of the protesting students accused the police of heavy-handedness.
“We haven’t broken anything. Is this how a democratic government reacts to protesting students? We have come to tell Blade Nzimande to start acting accordingly. Otherwise when we come back we will be nasty,” threatened an IT student who identified herself only as Nhlapo.
“The issue is simple: free education for all – so why should we bother bringing a memorandum when he knows our demands?” said Newton Masuku of the Radical Student Movement.
Lectures have been suspended at several university campuses following protests over looming fee increases.
Nzimande emphasised that tertiary education for all students was impossible.
“We are not going to fund the rich when they can afford to pay; it is not going to happen and such is not in government policy,” Nzimande said before the disruption.
The department did not want universities to shut down, he said, but due to acts of destruction in the past week, it supported those that had closed shop to save their properties from the violent minority.
THE ONGOING protests at the country’s universities are severely impacting on blood stocks.
The SA National Blood Service (SANBS) has made an urgent appeal to all eligible blood donors to donate.
“Students make up an average of about 40 percent of the 2 000 units of blood we collect a day. With the ongoing strikes, we can’t get onto university campuses,” said SANBS spokesperson Vanessa Raju yesterday.
“It has made it dangerous for our staff to set up mobile clinics. Depending on various factors, we collect between 100 and 200 units of blood on campus daily.”
Raju said the SANBS now had only 1.3 days of blood left. “To recover from this, we need to collect 5 000 units a day. At the moment we’re not even getting close to 3 000 units a day. We do go to schools, but with matrics writing prelims at the moment, we rely more on the universities because they are flexible.
“Hospitals have to cancel scheduled operations because at this stage we don’t even have enough for emergency cases, never mind for any possible complications.”
Raju said cancer patients who needed platelets and blood transfusions as part of their treatment regime were also hard hit.
“It’s a life-and-death situation. We are appealing to any and all eligible donors and those able to donate to come through and give blood. Now is the time to come out.”
DA spokesperson for health Jack Bloom said he was concerned that the shortage could lead to the cancellation of operations at hospitals.
Attempts to get comment from the Gauteng Department of Health were unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Higher Educa- tion Minister Blade Nzimande has called on Wits University and the police to conduct a full probe into the death of a worker during protests last week.
Wits has named the worker as Celumusa Ntuli, a cleaner on the Wits campus in Braamfontein. For more information on how you can help or donate, call the SANBS on 0800 11 9031