Educate this regime on its only priority

LAST November, you will remember, President Jacob Zuma held a meeting with university vice-chancellors and student leaders at the Union Buildings. Outside, thousands of students protested for a zero-fee increase this year.

There was some violence but it was limited. Yet the day ended in a huge victory for the students. Zuma announced that afternoon that there would indeed be no fee increase for 2016, even though he had no idea where the money to pay for it would come from. It was a spectacular climb-down. Something had spooked him. A first-hand account may help. When the participants in the meeting had sat down, Zuma opened with the observation that he understood the protests had spread because students were unhappy with their university councils.

The student leaders, one by one, got to their feet to say: “No, Mr President, we are protesting about university fees. They are unaffordable.”

“Oh,” said Zuma. “I have been misinformed.”

The man who had so misinformed him was in the meeting. Blade Nzimande, his minister for higher education, had been peddling the council myth prior to the meeting.

As the protest outside strengthened, Zuma had to act. But by giving in to that one demand on the day, he emboldened the students to such an extent that they have since added so many new demands — outsourcing, free education, colonialism — that the state has again lost control of the situation.

It would be wrong, though, to simply blame Nzimande for the mess. Zuma, typically, had made yet another poor appointment, appeasing the SACP as he built his cabinet rather than choosing the right person for a difficult and complex job. Blade is manifestly not up to it.

It is part of our tragedy that Zuma was able to do that because the parents of those students outside had allowed him to.

So cruel, so appalling, so inhuman was the apartheid system that the generation of young adults who in 1994 had first breathed the air of democracy and freedom — those who were now the parents — were programmed to forgive the ANC almost any mistake. For 20 years they utterly failed to hold it to account.

Leader after leader, from Nelson Mandela to Zuma himself, would go into elections promising the impossible and they were never held to it. One list of priorities would be followed by another.

But if everything is a priority then nothing is. Now we sit on the edge of a financial catastrophe just as the children of the revolution need money more than anything. And among the many targets of their anger are those same parents.

They “sold out” in 1994, goes the new cry. But that is patently unfair.

Even as a white male, I remember apartheid with dread. You just cannot compare South Africa today with then. The state was unbelievably violent. The police shot you or tortured you. The courts hanged you. You were in the wrong place with the wrong papers. Go back to your “area”.

It took unbelievable fortitude for black people, those parents and their parents, to survive it. When they were offered a deal, The Deal, a ceasefire if you like, they took it. Who wouldn’t have?

It is one thing today to be brave and invade campuses en masse and to face police who shoot teargas and stun grenades at you.

It was a completely different thing to be brave back then, when you were alone in a small cell with three security policemen and an electric shock machine.

You would have put your hand up for The Deal too.

What’s happening now isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that you don’t have the money to pay your fees. It isn’t fair that if you pay the fees, you have no money for food. No money for a place to sleep and learn.

There is loads of money in this country to help you and other struggling students, but it’s the government that has it. It is the government that spends it badly, on luxuries, grandiose schemes and all of its “priorities”.

All governments everywhere do stupid things until they are held to account, and that is directly in your power.

Hold them to account every day of the year. Because there really can only be one priority — that is what the word means — and that is your education.