South Africa’s higher education minister has dealt with fee increments for 2017 but sidestepped students’ fundamental issue: an ongoing call to make higher education free for all.
Free public higher education is possible and necessary. It’s also realistic, if it’s based on thorough research, consultation and students giving back through community service after graduation.
Two narratives have emerged from student protests in South Africa: reform on the one hand - and revolution on the other. Which narrative will triumph?
Despite its vagueness, the RET has become central to the contemporary ANC. It is destined to remain a powerful bloc within the party, and a constant constraint on Ramaphosa leadership.
South Africa needs to build a mental infrastructure that will allow people to individually and collectively engage in a bold, courageous and trutfhul dialogue.
South African students’ demands for free university education are not going away. Nor are the country’s economic realities.
Africa is now formally free of colonial rule. Yet, the aim of remembering and furthering the fight for self determination remains relevant as ever.
If South Africans are to make the radical changes they must to become truly great, the new generation will have to find a way of understanding the country’s past in its profound complexity.
There was nothing in President Zuma’s speech to suggest that he’d really listened to people’s concerns about higher education - nor to suggest that any solutions will be forthcoming.
It’s time South Africa stopped stereotyping its young people as being disinterested and morally bankrupt and started engaging them.
