Not the time to protest
PANYAZA Lesufi’s headaches started afresh yesterday as the 2016 school year got under way. He’s got a model school which couldn’t open because of no municipal water; he’s got a couple of underperforming principals, who he has publicly vowed to fire – along with a clutch of senior officials – and he’s got the usual migraine of overcrowding and unregistered pupils at primary and secondary schools all clamouring to get in.
The Gauteng education MEC’s biggest headache though is not one of these. Rather it is the spectre of a matric-wide boycott – and indeed protest – if the Class of 2016 choose to go out in solidarity with the university students campaigning for the #feesmustfall protest.
We have a history in this country of youth-led protest. Forty years ago, the youths of Soweto galvanised a moribund struggle against apartheid, rising up and inspiring an entire generation to do the same – across the country. The sacrifice of the Class of 1976 is fading, sadly, in the annals of history.
Their inspiration to the classes that followed and the sacrifice of those successive cohorts of pupils is also disappearing into the background. The stakes were immensely high; the country was in the grip of an oppressive regime and the parents of those children had effectively been cowed into submission.
Today, 21 years after the advent of democracy, very few people think back to the price those young patriots paid: beatings, torture, exile. The greatest price of all was the loss of an entire generation, rendering many unemployed and even unemployable.
This is the risk that no one talks about. The class of 2016 stand on the threshold of their final year of formal education. Their success in 11 months’ time will determine how they approach the next chapter in their lives: with confidence, with hope – or with nothing.
They have to stay in class, they have to study, they have to do as well as they possibly can, for their own sakes. #feesmustfall is not their fight, not this year. The stakes are just too high.