From the University of Cape Town (UCT) to Wits University, the cry has been the same: Sizofunda mahhala, we will study for free.
It is a slogan that first became popular during the #FeesMustFall movement that gripped campuses a decade ago. It has made a strong comeback over the past month as the start to yet another academic year is disrupted by picketing, class boycotts and even a hunger strike.
This October will mark 10 years since student protests against fee hikes erupted at UCT, Wits and Rhodes University and rapidly spread across many other campuses, sparking a nationwide movement that forced the government and tertiary institutions to announce there would be no fee increase the following year, in 2016.
The movement was the culmination of many years of sporadic, and sometimes co-ordinated, student strikes at various campuses over financial exclusion.
Access to quality education has always been a central part of the South African political conflict.
With the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1952, which institutionalised racially segregated schooling and unequal funding of schools based on skin colour, basic education institutions became sites of struggle.
It began with some of the best teachers in the 1950s quitting the profession in protest against “Bantu education”. Then the Soweto student uprisings in 1976 against government attempts to impose Afrikaans as a language of instruction for townships.
By 1986 effective schooling had all but collapsed in many urban townships due to running battles between students and authorities over various demands that had to do with students’ rejection of the Bantu education system.
It was largely because of these disruptions that the township youth generation of the mid-1980s and early 1990s came to be known as “the lost generation”. The assumption was that this generation had no future — having “wasted” much of their time in street fights with the police, in detention, on the run and even in exile.
But not all of them were sucked into the maelstrom — many, against all odds, went on to form the core of the then burgeoning black middle class that was seen as the “success story” of the first 15 years of post-apartheid South Africa.
In most cases, they did so by pulling themselves by their own bootstraps to become the first in their families to get post-matric qualifications.
Instead of criminalising students who are guilty only of seeking the key to a better life through education, should we not be looking for a long-lasting solution
How ironic then that the children of this generation, which had to jump over so many hurdles to overcome adversity, are now dubbed “the missing middle” and are, once again, protesting about access to education.
Although much has been done to make higher education accessible since the end of apartheid, failure to effectively tackle the “missing middle” dilemma has been the source of most instability at universities and other tertiary institutions.
Thousands of prospective students battle to gain admission at the start of every academic year because their families are not so poor that they qualify for the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). At the same time, their families do not earn enough to afford the exorbitant study and accommodation fees on their own.
Hence the annual protests and strikes. Some, out of desperation, are said to be even cheating the system by hiding the existence of their parents and registering their retired or unemployed grandparents as their legal guardians.
Last year the Special Investigating Unit revealed that NSFAS loses millions of rands each year by funding students who do not meet the criteria. According to the investigative body, by June last year, 421 students who did not qualify for NSFAS had acknowledged that they collectively owe the state more than R112m.
But instead of criminalising students who are guilty only of seeking the key to a better life through education, should we not be looking for a long-lasting solution that will benefit both individual students and society as a whole?
At a time when debate is raging over how finance minister Enoch Godongwana is going to plug a revenue shortfall amounting to billions of rand and still support social spending now that his two percentage point VAT hike is out the window, it is hard to argue for even more public spending on higher education.
But perhaps that is precisely what is needed, considering that one reason for the country’s low economic growth is the shortage of skills and the failure of the middle class — the main tax base — to expand.
Given the current national fiscus situation, clearly we are far from the “free education” system infamously declared by former president Jacob Zuma in his last ditch attempt to stay in office.
But what about raising the ceiling for NSFAS from an annual household income of R350,000 to R600,000? That would go a long way in ensuring access for more students, and have a knock-on effect for employment. Despite the South African phenomenon of unemployed graduates, it remains true that a person’s likelihood of finding work is improved by having a tertiary qualification.
Institutions such as Wits and the University of Johannesburg are doing their bit to try help some from “the missing middle”. The higher education department last year also announced a R3.8bn initial capitalisation fund to support this category of students. But clearly a more comprehensive strategy is needed.
Although South Africa’s presidency of the G20 this year seems to be stealing all the attention away from other issues, President Cyril Ramaphosa did promise in his state of the nation address that the long-touted national dialogue is still on the cards.
One of that dialogue’s pressing questions should be how do we finally resolve the higher education funding problem.
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