Year in, year out, South Africans witness the same dramatic scenes: students protesting at tertiary education institutions and skirmishes with police and security officers.
This year is no different, and will be remembered for the death of an innocent bystander, Mthokozisi Ntumba, and an attempted cover-up by public order police. Only this Monday were the culprits arrested.
The government’s response to the higher education funding crisis has been piecemeal, inept, unimaginative and totally inadequate. Worse, there is no sense that there is full appreciation of the scale and nature of the problem or that the decisionmakers have learnt anything from the past few years.
The problem is not new; it has been compounding every year as more poor black African students enter the doors of higher learning. To be clear, this is not a suggestion that the students are a problem — the policymakers are.
A bit of background is important here. The core of the problem has been the failure to manage expectations of students and their parents as well as the lack of a durable solution to how higher education — including post-school vocational training — should be funded. Over time, the problem has grown to R10bn debt.
Since coming into power in 1994, the ANC government has been promising free education. This has been achieved at basic education level, where progress has been made with the extension of fee-free primary and high schools.
However, little if any progress has been made to make higher education free. Instead, state subsidies to universities have been reduced. Only a few universities, including the University of Johannesburg, had the luxury of tapping into reserves to make up for the shortfall.
The result has been to put university administrators on a collision course with students. The government’s initial — and continued — response was to wrongly characterise the protests as a law-and-order issue, not a political-economic one.
In 2015, two developments occurred that would change the course of events. First, Julius Malema formed the EFF using the ANC Youth League machinery as its base; and second, having suffered electoral decline in the 2014 polls, the ANC was left with no choice but to respond to the radical populist movement sweeping through the country, especially the #FeesMustFall campaign.
With no coherent plan to address the students’ demands, then president Jacob Zuma formed a commission and an interministerial task team. A piecemeal solution was the top-up of the largely ineffectual National Student Financial Aid Scheme, and infiltration of the #FeesMustFall movement. The commission’s recommendations have yet to be implemented, which partly explains today’s crisis.
On his way out of office, and on the eve of the ANC’s elective conference in December 2017, Zuma announced that fee-free higher education would be introduced the next year. With the 2018/2019 budget almost finalised, this announcement forced then finance minister Malusi Gigaba to scramble to find funds to finance one of Zuma’s most enduring legacies. Gigaba was in the job for only a few months before being reshuffled back to the home affairs portfolio.
In the process, a few more changes took place. First, there were changes to the political leadership of the higher education portfolio (incumbent Blade Nzimande was replaced by Hlengiwe Mkhize in 2017, who was replaced in 2018 by Naledi Pandor), and the administrative leadership of some universities and student bodies has changed too.
These changes — especially on campuses — affect the chemistry and dynamics of negotiations and conflict resolution. But the biggest problem is lack of political leadership and imagination.
Nzimande has shown no leadership. There is no sense at all that his department has learnt anything from the #FeesMustFall era. Ntumba’s death appears to have been the only factor on which the ANC has been united in its condemnation. But there doesn’t seem to be consensus on what else to do.
Calling for a new funding model and policy is not leadership; nor is kicking the ball to campus administrators. Surely, this alternative policy should have already been in place by now.
Though back in the portfolio, Nzimande is not solely to blame. His colleagues in the ANC leadership, especially those at Luthuli House, should shoulder part of the responsibility. Standing with the students on their demands is an easy political stance to take, but it’s not a solution. A concrete plan is what is required, and the government should take the lead in this.
Increasingly, the state is abdicating its responsibility for basic public services such as education for children and quality health care for all citizens. More concerning has been the decision by the National Prosecuting Authority to accept a R30m financial donation from Steinhoff to help with a complex fraud investigation into company officials.
This style of governance must come to an end. There are many proposals on the table, some of them workable. Leadership is about making choices.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is executive for strategy and public affairs at the Small Business Institute.
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