Time for revolt: Students back to square one

My higher education year started in 2007, right after matric. A month into the start of my journalism studies at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), we received an SMS saying classes would be suspended until further notice.

Students were striking. As journalism students, we were tasked with getting the news first. Issues of academic exclusion, funding, accommodation and financial exclusion were raised by the protesters. As a newly matriculated 18 year old, I didn’t know what those issues meant.

The following year, we received a similar SMS from the university. The same issues were again raised. Having a better understanding then, I realised many were “excluded” because they did not have enough funds to pay their fees, including the then annual R1 500 registration fee. Many still battled to find decent accommodation, with
some of my friends having to share a one-bedroom flat in Sunnyside with five or more others.

In my second year, the protests and violence heightened. Students caught a bus from the Ga-Rankuwa and Soshanguve campuses to protest at the main Pretoria campus. They vowed no classes would proceed until their demands were met. Standing outside the journalism department, we heard singing and chanting from a distance and looking to our right, we noticed a large group of angry students carrying knobkerries. They had just emptied the lecture room of the public relations class, threatened lecturers and forced students to go home.

We quickly ran in, locked the door and sat quietly waiting for the angry group to march past. We would jokingly say protests seemed to be part of the university’s policy. However, working as a journalist, I realised this was not just a TUT thing and that students across the country faced the same issues at the start of each academic year.

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It was satisfying to see these institutional protests merge into one massive #FeesMustFall movement, although it saw public violence, rubber bullets, teargas and hundreds of arrests when they all met on the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria in 2015 to voice their issues.

Hope seemed restored when former president Jacob Zuma announced in 2017 that education would be free in future. However, in 2022, students find themselves in the same situation my peers were in 15 years ago. Again, they are protesting for accommodation and funding and against academic and financial exclusion.

Despite the National Student Financial Aid Scheme offering bursaries instead of loans, most students in the middle class are still deemed “too rich” for funding, even though they cannot afford the exorbitant and continuously increasing university fees.

And the poor still face the challenges of not receiving funding in time to pay for books and accommodation. This has left room for communities to exploit the opportunity, offering inadequate accommodation to students in need, leaving them vulnerable to robberies, break-ins, rape and violence.

With the new academic year about to commence and despite Zuma’s announcement, it seems students are back to square one.