Fatima Shabodien
The #FeesMustFall uprising — arguably the biggest social movement we have seen in post-apartheid South Africa — will have far-reaching impact in universities and higher education institutions beyond our shores. In London, India and the US similar protests have emerged.
The government announced a zero-fee increase, while many universities committed in principle to insourcing workers. However, these powerful victories are seen by many not only as a smokescreen, but a diversion from bigger demands for free, quality education and tangible transformation at all universities and educational institutions across the country. This movement signals much more than a rejection of unaffordable education and unjust labour brokering.
It is a historical moment, because it represents a rejection of the systemic factors bred by the economic framework, which almost perfectly clones the one entrenched under apartheid. This framework continues to reproduce a society that oppresses and privileges people on the basis of race, class and gender — where most white South Africans are middle class and most black South Africans live in poverty, with black women bearing the brunt of this oppression.
Our liberation struggle may have overthrown an oppressive regime and replaced it with a representative people’s democracy, but the ultimate goal of achieving a life of dignity for all South Africans seems far out of reach. The students are forcing us to ask if government has the commitment and courage it presented in 1994, to push ahead and dismantle the economic structure that persistently reproduces privilege, power and poverty in our land.
As I sat listening to [French economist] Thomas Piketty at this year’s Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture, I was waiting to hear something new. The truth is, Piketty did not say anything that mass democratic and poor people’s movements hadn’t already been demanding for more than two decades — redistribution of land; a living wage; and access to quality education and health for all.
When we took power in our country in 1994, the world was at a fragile crossroads and we were faced with many uncertainties. The most benign explanation for the economic path we chose was that if we rejected a neoliberal economic system that privileges profit above people, our economy would crash. Twenty years down the line the world looks very different and we are a much less fragile country. So what prevents us from choosing a different economic model? I can’t think of many legitimate reasons, especially considering increasing unemployment and deepening inequality.
We have seen many examples from around the world, notably in Latin America, where states have chosen differently, helping to secure more dignified lives for the poor — and the earth has not fallen off its axis. We do not need a protracted debate and another few decades of dithering. Right now, we need dialogue to reach an agreement on the minimum shifts required to break our poverty-privilege reproducing machine. Civil society organisations have a key role to play in such dialogue and should now be coming forward to create spaces and opportunities for this.
Focus on basic services
Achieving true structural transformation is a momentous task, but we have to start somewhere. We need to take stock of the innumerable obstacles that prevent people from accessing quality education and systematically eliminate each one of them. Consider for a moment coming from a home where the average monthly income is that of a teacher in our schools –R13?839 gross.
Average fees and living costs at university are R5 000 a month – without travel, toiletries, laundry, not to mention books, phone and other basic essentials. How can it make sense for the child of a teacher to enter their adult working life with a debt equal to two years net income of his or her parent? This is the reality for most of our young people. Education is crucial for unlocking our human and economic potential and should be the state’s programmatic and budget priority.
The same is true for healthcare, and government has a proposal on the table. Why are we reluctant to give sufficient focus on making this a reality? Those opposing the National Health Insurance scheme are already being subsidised by the state in private healthcare; this needs to change. Being healthy cannot be a condition of one’s ability to pay. It is a precondition for realising both our human potential and rights long denied the majority of South Africans.
But the focus cannot only be on what the state should provide. We have in our midst massive and often obscene wealth, living cheek-by-jowl with debilitating poverty. Trillions of rands in tax owed to the public purse by multinational corporations leave our shores every year in acrobatic tax avoidance schemes. We, and the rest of the African continent, would not have a budget crisis if corporations paid their taxes.
We need to see the introduction of a national living wage. If companies cannot afford it, then it simply means they were not viable in capitalist terms. The capitalist logic of “survival of the fittest” should hold, and they should be held to it too.
The much-feared job losses will likely transpire, but as we saw in Brazil, increasing the minimum national wage boosts the spending power of workers and acts as a powerful economic stimulus, which helps increase the GDP and in turn, creates other jobs.
What we need now is more than just conflict avoidance and tinkering with education fees to appease angry students. We need to use this historical moment to agree on what is essential to realise the Freedom Charter that so many had to die for. If we don’t, the students, workers and government will soon find themselves back in this crisis yet again.
Helping the poorest
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