Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
We can’t just burn, leaders tell students
FORMER Constitutional Court Judge Yvonne Mokgogo yesterday urged students to move away from destructive protests and embrace dialogue and meaningful engagement.
The call from Judge Mokgoro, chairwoman of the Social Cohesion Reference Group came as she launched # AccessThuto yesterday, a campaign to use dialogue, leadership and lessons from history to restore order at universities.
The movement is a coalition between Mokgoro’s association, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and Brand SA.
The aim is for South Africans to take collective responsibility for the issues that have led to the crises on campuses.
“What we have seen in the last few days has reached a crisis point. It has an uncanny resemblance to apartheid and before we have another Hector Pieterson, we as active civil society must speak up and act.
“We need to add our support to universities and to students so we do move away from this difficult climate of destruction and conflict to one of dialogue and conversation,” said Mokgoro at the launch of #AccessThuto at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton.
Conversation and dialogue are not just nice to have, said Sello Hatang, chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, they are deliberate mechanisms to avoid conflict, to deepen understanding and to make peace and tolerance a reality.
Mokgoro said universities and students could use the knowledge and experience of institutions such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation which have a proven record of understanding the role of activism and struggle but framed within the end goal of fostering tolerance, fairness and sustained nation building.
Hatang said: “The level of anger we are seeing at universities is justified. But we cannot allow burning things to be ‘ the South African way’ of protest. We cannot normalise something that is abnormal.
“We have to name the things that are keeping us from having honest conversations and we have to acknowledge that somewhere in our journey of transformation things have gone wrong.”
He said issues of deep inequality in society, a sense of alienation of sectors of the population from opportunity, racism, a lack of leadership in all sectors of society and the absence of personal responsibility from every South African were at play.
Neeshan Balton, chief executive of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, said the price of civil society doing nothing at this point of racial conflict and intolerance will “become intractable”.
The campaign will be a concerted effort to engage with vice-chancellors, students and broader society to support and mediate. It will begin with a meeting this month between #AccessThuto leaders and vice chancellors.