A meeting between disgruntled University of Johannesburg students and management is expected to be convened on Friday, university officials said.
”We will be meeting with student representatives at 2pm and fee increases and protest action over the past four days will be high on the agenda,” the university’s spokesperson Sonia Cronjé told the South African Press Association.
Cronje said there would not be a special council meeting ‒- as reported by media — on Friday.
The SRC has complained that the Doornfontein, Soweto and Bunting Road campuses were being sidelined when compared with the Kingsway campus — previously the Rand Afrikaans University before a merger of the institutions.
They also charged that students, mostly white, who played rugby, were afforded more bursaries than black students who played soccer.
Police arrested 43 students during protests earlier in the week and all were later released on bail and are expected to re-appear in court on October 25.
Student representatives plan to hand over a memorandum of their demands to the university management at the meeting on Friday.
The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has called for more balanced consideration in the increase of higher education fees in the interest of nation-building.
”The commission would like to appeal to university leadership to pay due regard to the economic hardship faced by many of the families and to keep fee increases to a minimum as the Education Minister, Naledi Pandor has proposed,” the commission’s spokesperson Vincent Moaga said.
He said the Constitution provided that everyone had a right to further education. – Sapa