It should go down in history as the week of national humiliation. The chaos and stun grenades we witnessed outside the country’s Parliament in Cape Town and the shutdown of the major city centres of Johannesburg and Pretoria – all signal one simple fact: the wheels have come off.
The protests against hikes in university fees, the Marikana Massacre of 2012, the ever-growing discontent among communities about service delivery and the xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals early this year should have sent us an early warning.
But we decided to bury our heads in the sand and forgot that the growing income gap between the rich and the poor has become too unsustainable.
In the next few days we are sure going to be fed a staple diet of how the students’ demands are unreasonable and why they may not be met. There are those who are going to try and hijack them and others who will try to score cheap political points out of the desperate situation.
But what will be conveniently forgotten is that the united might of the movement of #FeesMustFall has shown the country’s ruling class, business and the intelligentsia that the masses we have all assumed to be simple are more sophisticated than our highfaluting understanding of their problems.
No longer can we go about telling the world that we are the most stable democracy in Africa, when such demonstrations play themselves across for the world to see.
Instead of focusing and planning on moving the country forward, the government appears stuck in its old and worn out ways of thinking that it’s business as usual.
Meanwhile, business seems content to just tag along and hope for the best, while cashing in from the largesse of the political heavyweights. That largesse has become a buffer between them and the restless masses. The rewards for believing in the “Rainbow Nation” were token empowerment deals that benefited the few politically connected at the expense of the majority.
This belief that the masses are a homogenous group that can be trampled upon even emboldened universities, that rely on the public purse for their own survival, to demand a higher than inflation double-digit fee increase under the prevailing economic conditions.
This at the time when Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene is telling us that the public wage bill would increase more than tenfold to R63.9 billion in the next three years.
The student revolt should give us a chilling reminder that it can no longer be business as usual. That the uprising represents growing desperation among the masses. After 21 years into democracy all they have to show for are promises, intellectual explanations and summit after summit about their plight.
Sadly for poor South Africans, the failure to put food on the tables is not an academic exercise. It is real.
Parents, who are already burdened by a moribund economy, a rising cost of living and high unemployment cannot afford an extra cent to spend on anything other than the day-to-day needs.
In 1968, Western Europe alienated many young people and forced them into militant groups that engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies and shoot-outs with the police for three decades.
African Spring?
More recently, a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protest against the widening gap in income levels started independently in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt. For South Africa, the lessons should be quite palpable.
When PW Botha was at his mighty best, students brought him down by unleashing wave after wave of popular protests for what they felt was a fair share of their slice in the political and economic pie. It would be foolish, therefore, for the elite to dismiss this growing sentiment against inequality as something that would come to pass.
The government will have to change gears and focus on introducing policies that will truly stimulate economic growth and give hope to the majority. Business will do well to side with the students who are set to shape the future of this country. And universities must climb down from their high horse and understand their role in society.
We should heed Zwelinzima Vavi, who, before his disgrace for snacking on a pretty young thing, warned of the day when the masses would take to the streets against what he called “a predatory state” that was represented by the ruling class, capital and the intelligentsia.
Failure to do that will lead to an African Spring and throw the already fragile economy into an abyss.
BUSINESS REPORT