Durban - The president of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s SRC “took it personally” when radio DJ Phat Joe called students at the university “the worst people in the world”.
Student protests turned violent last week. Following a series of arson attacks, East Coast Radio DJ Phat Joe made the remarks on air. A relatively new addition to the station’s team, he has found himself at the centre of what he describes as an “anti-Phat Joe campaign” at UKZN.
“Here comes Phat Joe and makes a joke about it. You have said you have your way of doing things but the way you did it, it took the attention off the protest to make it as if for the whole two or three weeks there was violence at UKZN,” Central SRC president Senzo Ngidi said at a round table discussion on the protest action, hosted by the radio station and facilitated by Phat Joe.
The DJ said he did not speak as an authority on a lot of the issues he dealt with. “I am more of a comedian, I’m not a journalist. So what I do is I use a lot of irony and comedy to deal with difficult issues. There is no doubt that there was a difficult issue that day.
“The community - the entire community of UKZN - was in pain that day and my job is to defuse that pain in some way,” he said.
He also qualified his statement. “I said the students who burnt those buildings down - the ones who participated, I was very specific - were the worst people in the world.”
Postgraduate student Lukhona Mnguni asked the student leaders: “How do you ensure that you are in control of a protest? What for me is a challenge to the leadership sitting next to me is that when you are leading a protest, you must be in total control of even those elements that could be opportunistic. What I want to hear from my leaders, as a student, is how you ensure that you are in total control, to a point that no-one can infiltrate?”
Responding, the chairman of the South African Students Congress (Sasco), Lwandile Mtsolo, said they would not trivialise the issue of burning property. It was sad but they simply could not control a protest. “How do we monitor who becomes part and parcel? It’s a student protest led by an organisation, where individuals come with their own agendas.”
On fee increases, Ngidi said institutions of higher learning were public institutions which meant they required funding from the government.”It cannot be true that raising fees is the only way of dealing with the deficit,” Ngidi said.
But Mnguni said students were placing the fees problem “at the wrong feet” if they went solely to the universities. He said the government had been underfunding the sector and that the first point of call should be for universities to be given a bail-out and then government funding needed to be increased.
UKZN is one of 16 universities projected to lose a combined total of almost R4 billion if a 0% increase is implemented next year.
The Mercury