Thug activism

LAST week, President Jacob Zuma announced that a bill had been introduced to Parliament to categorise criminal acts to infrastructure as a serious economic offence.

The ink has hardly dried and University of KwaZulu-Natal students have given the president reason to add another name to the list.

It is actually generous to call those who torched a car and set the university administrative building alight “students”. A better name would be “thugs”.

These gangsters now have the temerity to announce that they will be “intensifying” their campaign. There is simply no reason for students, no matter how convinced they are that they are in the right, to act as they have done at the university’s Westville campus.

Student activism is a fact of life all over the world. South Africa is exceptional in that such protests are linked to the levels of violence and criminality that the university has experienced since the beginning of the week.

As legislation regarding where people can smoke has shown, it sometimes takes an enactment of a law to change behaviour assumed by some to be natural.

The state must therefore amend the bill introduced to Parliament last week or introduce a new one that will place anarchy at varsities on the list of crimes deserving special attention.

South Africans must not be held to ransom by those who will accuse the state of being totalitarian or anti-poor when it acts against those who damage state property and prevent staff and other students carrying on with their lives.

There is nothing pro-poor about allowing hooligans to run the show. In fact, linking poverty to these criminal acts is an insult to the poor.

We are under no illusion that arresting, prosecuting and jailing of criminals who mistake the student card for a licence to be hooligans will solve the many and legitimate issues that many students face.

This must happen not because student issues are invalid, but because their behaviour in raising their issues is unacceptable. And it never will be acceptable.