‘We greet you, Comrades, in the struggle for better education.” The invitation from the South African Union of Student Representative Councils (SAU-SRC) reeked of serious leftist student politics. And the odour didn’t seem too pleasing to the SRCs of a number of universities. Only half the 22 higher education institutions in the country made it to the 10th annual meeting of the SAU-SRC last weekend, and of these the majority were from ”formerly disadvantaged” institutions.
I had arrived as a representative from Rhodes University’s SRC, an institution characterised by its apolitical nature. Students run as independent candidates and backing from political parties — commonly practised at other universities — is not allowed.
The political atmosphere at the meeting took me by surprise. ”Aman-dla!” chants a member of the South African Students Congress as he begins his speech. After the fifth ”awe-thu!” the absence of paler faces at the conference begins to make more sense.
The SAU-SRC is an avowedly non-political body. It is the delegates who determine the atmosphere. Not that politics of any sort was a deterrent for the University of Pretoria. SRC president Alisha Smit crisply informs me that ”the political thing is not a problem for us, because at Tukkies we are politically involved”. A very specific kind of politics — the Freedom Front has won all elections there since 1996.
Smit says her SRC has withdrawn from the SAU-SRC for the past three years, citing organisational problems, ineffectiveness and a lack of financial accountability.
University of Cape Town SRC president Sicelo Mbambo concurs. ”We are concerned about the membership fee of R5 000, as we have never received a report outlining how the finances are spent or what the organisation has done in the past financial year.”
Mandla Seopela, newly elected president of the SAU-SRC, acknowledges the problem. The recently elected leadership has been mandated to hire a reputable firm to audit its finances.
However, beyond the union’s administrative problems lies a deeper divergence. On issues like transformation especially, a mixed response is evoked. The SAU-SRC seeks to present a united student voice to the Department of Education on issues of national importance. The lack of consensus among universities makes this difficult.
Issues facing some universities are simply not shared by their more privileged counterparts. But does this necessitate two separate bodies?
Smit mentions discussions that the Tukkies SRC has been involved in with Rand Afrikaans University, University of Potchefstroom and University of the Free State to ”address the problem”, but clams up quickly when asked about the nature of these discussions.
A new apartheid? A bit extreme perhaps. But while SRCs are tangled up in bureaucracy, students still face acute problems, such as funding. The SAU-SRC is optimally placed to tackle these, but will continue to struggle when there is a schism between the institutions it is meant to be representing.