Pietermaritzburg - Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande has again lambasted protesting students calling for fee-free education and said the protests were the work of a third force and political in nature.
He was speaking at the Pietermaritzburg launch of the first book by the Mzala Nxumalo Centre, Strive For Excellence: A Social and Political History of Georgetown High School on Tuesday.
This is the school he attended as a matric student in 1975 and is the first black high school in the Pietermaritzburg area in KwaZulu-Natal.
He told the audience, mostly filled with current Georgetown High School students and alumni, that government was providing free education at TVET colleges but was not yet able to roll it out to more people.
He said the Presidential Fees Commission would look at ways to cover more students.
Pleading with parents to intervene in calling on students to return to class, Nzimande said the children of the rich would be sent to schools overseas where fees would be unaffordable for them.
He estimated fees at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the like, at R1.5m per year and said he too could not afford that.
“If this goes on any further and we burn schools, the children that will suffer are those from poor households, because the rich will just send their children overseas.
“Students are not fighting for the poor, they are fighting for the rich. Just one year at Oxford or Cambridge costs R1.5m per year, even I as a minister cannot afford that,” he said.
Pleading with parents, he said: “You can't just take your children to university and say Nzimande it is your problem, please stand up and say enough now, there is a third hand now,” he said.
Nzimande said the protests were evidently political and said they were meant to overthrow the ANC government.
In pleading with pupils, he said: “I hope you will be a generation that values educational property and schools, so we do not have what happened at Vuwani where 30 schools were burnt down and the destruction of property at our universities.”