The anger goes deeper than fees
On Monday, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande announced fee increases for universities for next year. Is it good news or bad?
Overall it’s good — or it should be. It’s good news from universities’ point of view. The 8% figure comes from a recommendation by the Council on Higher Education. Now universities will have to make the final choice about their increases.
It’s also a pro-poor policy. The minister confirmed that students who benefit from the National Student Aid Financial Scheme (NSFAS) will not pay increased fees in 2017.
The good news is that he added a second category of students who will not be required to pay increased fees next year: the missing middle. These are students whose parents earn too much money to qualify for loans from the NSFAS but too little to afford university fees. Money will now be found to ensure that this group doesn’t pay increased fees in 2017.
It was a measured statement. The minister could have made a purely political announcement — one that would have been closer to the governing ANC’s recent support for 0% increase for the second consecutive year.
But the announcement hasn’t been good news to a significant proportion of the student population. Mass meetings were being held at several campuses after the minister’s press conference so students could discuss their responses and plan their next moves.
What would students have liked to hear from the minister? There is such a groundswell of unhappiness among students, it wouldn’t have mattered what he said.
It started long before last year’s #FeesMustFall movement and goes back to the #RhodesMustFall protests that saw a statue of Cecil John Rhodes removed from the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) campus. There are the issues of inequality, of decolonisation.
A significant proportion of the born-frees, those who were born in or after 1994, have had enough. They’re fed up on all fronts — with the state, with university management. Too many things have been left for too long. It’s viewed as doing too little, too late. Now there’s a crisis.
The focus in the next few days will be less on making fee-related decisions or discussing the minister’s announcement. UCT suspended all academic activities in anticipation of the announcement. Universities will be focusing on security, on whether to keep open or to shut them down amid safety concerns. There’s no head space to tackle students’ underlying deep-seated anger and frustration.
We will be trying to figure out the cost of security day by day instead of having bigger discussions.