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EDWIN NAIDU
SOUTH Africa’s R16.5 billion student debt crisis will continue to escalate with the renewed threat of shutdowns and violence at tertiary institutions, warn senior education experts Enver Motala and Salim Vally.
Both academics argue that the recent protests at the University of Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town, the University of KwaZulu Natal and the Durban University of Technology, among other tertiary institutions, have arisen from various issues.
These include registration fees, the restrictive admission policies affected by student debt, accommodation and housing, food and hunger, transport and other necessities in a learning environment.
“Even more fundamentally, they concern the much-vaunted claims about the ‘transformation’ of universities and the relationship between the university and society. Once again, we see the possibility of more shutdowns and violence signalled using ‘security’ guards and pepper spray, interdicts and condemnations and the inevitable resistance that this will bring from students,” said Motala and Vally.
Motala is a research associate of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, and Vally is a professor at UJ’s Education Faculty.
Motala and Vally said that the current round of protests was entirely predictable, a view they shared during the 2015 #feesmustfall uprising by students in protest against the increase in student fees when they warned that the promise of “free education” would come back to haunt the government.
“That’s because leaders fail to understand what’s at stake in the demands for genuinely free quality education for all. University administrators expected the government student Funding Agency – the National Students Financial Aid Scheme – to solve the affordability problem. But the scheme, which the organisation monitoring tax abuse has noted, has spent more than R166-million on office rental space despite cutting back on subsidies for student accommodation,” they said.
According to Motala and Vally, NSFAS will not resolve the fundamental question students continue to place before the nation.
“And no amount of goodwill and the charitable work of individuals, philanthropies, SRCs and agencies trying to fill the gap will resolve it sustainably either. At the end of 2021, student debt had increased to R16.5-billion and will continue to spiral upwards at the present rate.”
Instead, Motala and Vally suggest that the effect of the proposed profit-generating loan scheme will deepen the pockets of billionaires (and the institutions they control) and increase the indebtedness of the poor and marginalised.
“All this confirms again that those in power have learnt very little from the past and will continue to cling to the capricious hope that somehow the problem will go away. Yet the underlying reasons for the student’s struggles are no less than a continuation of the same fundamental causes provoking the same consequences. They are a combination of the austerity policies of the government, to which university executives have acquiesced, the ill-fated logic of university corporatisation and the absence of any sense of democratic accountability to the wider public of the university, especially, but not only to the communities of the most marginalised in our society.”
Motala and Vally warned against the grudging and opportunistic application of the fee ‘exemption’ applying to some students only on the false assumption that it would be regressive to apply ‘free education’ universally.
“We set out the arguments why this was bound to fail.”
“Now even policy-makers proclaim that they are concerned about the fate of the ‘missing middle’, that cohort of students are not being supported by the student aid – exactly what we had warned would be an inevitable consequence of government’s prevarications. For the great majority of students, the present situation engenders numerous insecurities and traumas, a consequence of not knowing what will happen next, the often-thwarted attempt to complete university studies to get a job to repay debt, including a host of other socio-psychological effects on students, and indeed on their teachers and supervisors.”
Motala and Vally said that the failure to appreciate the implications of ignoring the compelling case for free quality education for all as set out in our and other submissions to the Heher Commission would only deepen the subjugation and marginalisation of those communities most vulnerable to the laws of the market privileging (once again) only the socio-political elite while entrenching unequal relations between rich and poor.
“Austerity is possibly the most powerful instrument in the hands of such elites who are turning societies into rich picking grounds for the appropriation (and expropriation) of the public good through the cruel and unthinking logic of the power of global elites including financial institutions who benefit from the interest paid on student loans.”
They warn that university leaders, who ought to have seen these consequences from at least the protests of 2015, appear to be blinded by their roles as managers of the process of knowledge corporatisation.
“Universities should not renege on their responsibility to submit to the validating criteria of the public good – that is, the right of citizens in a democratic society to demand that those in power are open to democratic public accountability. For universities, given their much-proclaimed role in the defence of intellectual freedom, it demands a critical orientation to the power of fiat. It requires their commitment to public knowledge production and education untrammelled by the disfigurement of the corporate injunction. It demands the acceptance and promotion of a wider,
more enduring and conscientious commitment to public accountability.”
On Thursday, days after tension flared on campus, the University of the Witwatersrand said in a statement that the Vice-Chancellor and Principal and members of management met with the current members of the Students’ Representative Council. Both parties agreed to de-escalate the situation and continue with engagements to resolve matters.
“We will continue with talks as we try to find a way forward.”
INSIDE EDUCATION