Leadership is urgently required to fix SA’s education crisis

Right now would be the perfect time to convene an urgent convention to attend to the student uprisings that are springing up on various campuses across the country.

Our news cycle is so fast that some events hardly register on our national consciousness before they’re replaced by more current and urgent matters. The problem is, current and urgent don’t necessarily translate to important.

It is the work of our leaders to determine which matters are deemed important for us to attend to. The #FeesMustFall movement is one such matter. Unless urgently attended to, it has the potential to spiral out of control and leave us all regretting that we did not nip it in the bud when the chance presented itself.

Two years ago, we were waking up to news of campus after campus being set on fire and students running rampage on our streets, demanding free higher education. We had a priest shot in the face at Wits University, student leaders arrested en masse at UCT and student leader Mcebo Dlamini spending months behind bars.

And our national leadership was missing in action. When the Heher commission was finally set up to look at the feasibility of free higher education, it was way too late in the day, exams had been disrupted and academic programmes had to be moved over into the following year.

None of the violent tactics employed by the students or the style of policing employed against them must be allowed to happen again. This time around, the government has been warned. But signs are Jacob Zuma’s government is doing what it does best, waiting till the last minute to react.

The tragedy of telling the students that there is no money for free higher education is that it is being done in an atmosphere of terrible waste of government resources through wasteful expenditure and looting of state coffers.

It now rings hollow whenever a senior government leader says there is no money for a worthy project, when all and sundry know that money is being siphoned off daily through stateowned enterprises.

One day you read a report that German software giants SAP has paid over a R100 million as a bribe to ensure it secured state businesses; the next day you’re told there is no money.

In a world where we wake up to self-confessed criminals like Glenn Agliotti calling the president “one of us”, how can students and society trust such leaders to provide the necessary honest leadership when it comes to the sourcing of funds to alleviate the burden of expensive university fees on poor students?

It is the same president who has been sitting on the Heher commission report into the feasibility of free higher education. Not to mention that, in the midst of all this, he also fired the minister of higher education.

It is expected that, as head of government, Zuma must provide the expected leadership right now. Leadership that will assure the nation that students who are about to sit for their exams will do so without having to take to the streets to force him to provide leadership.

If there is money to pay off the likes of Agliotti, surely money can be found for free higher education.

Sydney Majoko.

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