Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
It’s not about fees, it’s really about inequality
The elephant in the room needs to be named, writes Andrew Ihsaan Gasnolar
THE NATIONAL conversation stimulated by students through the #RhodesMustFall, # FeesMustFall and # NationalShutDown campaigns, and the often violent events that have punctuated it have been bittersweet.
There is inspiration in seeing young South Africans risk life and limb once more for a principle in a manner reminiscent of 1976, this time in the precinct of Parliament, the hard-won People’s House and on university campuses.
Their principle is to fight for access to education, to confront entrenched inequality and the costs of our transition to democracy.
There is disappointment and sadness, too, at the incapability of leadership across the aisles of Parliament to meaningfully engage in that conversation with students.
It seems more convenient to try to limit the conversation to fee level increases; 6 percent or 10 percent. Students are right when they say if leaders continue to talk about percentages, they are not listening.
My life would not be what it is if I had not been able to reap the benefits of a great education. It has given me access to a number of prestigious educational and leadership programmes and has opened many doors for me.
However, this was only made possible through the efforts of my single mother and my aunt.
It was through their efforts that I was able to go from a primary school on the Cape Flats to the privileged and resourced hallways of a former Model-C high school in Rondebosch.
Despite a great high school, I knew early on that my mother, a teacher, would not be able to afford to put me through university. Against many odds I, like many other students, had to work and study – to struggle, to carve out a different life.
I have been lucky. Not so lucky are those who are trying to get leaders to deal with the elephant in the room that has trampled over so many dreams, and threatens to crush many more.
Make no mistake, inequality is the result of a very, very broken social society that has no compact.
Inequality continues to fester, despite long being identified, because of a lack of leadership. Far too many people, some who were part of the struggle of the 1970s and the 1980s, will dismiss the campaigns and the scenes outside Parlia- ment last week, and on our university campuses as unacceptable student behaviour – forgetting (wilfully) the images of those decades, while at the same time using them to build their own political pedigree.
They know the underlying issues. They just do not want to acknowledge them.
In the most unequal society in the world, leaders find it fitting to deny the marginalised their education – the great leveller – and kowtow to this nonsense that a university education is a privilege.
It is not, nor ever should be. Education is a basic right afforded to all South Africans by our constitution.
The real issue is that leaders who once made promises for the very things the students are fighting for, have reneged on their promises, and hypocritically are unprepared to engage in an honest conversation about those failed promises.
These are not simply students protesting. This is not business as usual. This is not just about percentage increases. This is about defining our future by the way we treat our emerging intelligentsia.
And already they have something to say. We had better start listening.
Of course, a new funding model and substantially more civic and citizen involvement is required to ensure that fees are more affordable to facilitate access to higher education. While on their own, models and civic involvement would be important steps, they will not solve the problem of inequality. At least we will have begun to talk deal honestly and openly about the legacy of apartheid that has driven deep into African soil the causes of that scourge.
Instead, we see attempts to engineer this national crisis into vote winning soundbites, self-interest, the hijacking of the student voice, and above all, a refusal to call the elephant in the room by its real name: inequality. Instead, we witness for the umpteenth time, excessive force from the South African Police Service and private security firms against what has largely been a demonstration by unarmed and peaceful students who are demanding change and a future.
Apartheid-style tactics and brutality cannot be permitted in a democratic and free South Africa; nor can wild talk of treason.
To go on and charge students with public violence and contravention of the National Key Point Act and the Gathering Act is disingenuous and betrays a deep dishonesty in the police service heart.
Where were these accusations when the Gupta family landed at Waterkloof Air Force Base, which is a national key point? Our young students, denied a hearing, kept prom- ises, leadership, and without a clear path out of marginalisation as education is put further away from them, are now forced to risk themselves for a basic and constitutionally guaranteed right.
This is the tipping point. The point at which you think decisive and sound leadership would be able to step into the breach. Alas, what the events of the past few weeks have proved, is that real leadership does not exist in South Africa.
Instead we are stuck with selfindulgent, empty vessels unable to hold any moral standpoint. These so-called leaders are still to wake up to the fact that they are the problem and that a business as usual approach will not neutralise the movement for change.
● Gasnolar is a Mandela Washington Fellow, a Mandela Rhodes Scholar, and a WEF Global Shaper.