Students have a significant bargaining chip: they can simply not vote for the ANC next year, says Shanti Aboobaker.
Johannesburg - *Zanele sent a direct message to @IOL’s Twitter account this past Wednesday.
It said students were being rounded up individually, identified as being problematic and assaulted by the University of Johannesburg’s security guards.
She wondered if Independent Media could urgently send a journalist to report on the incident.
We eventually got back to her on Thursday morning.
She was terse and sounded stressed on the phone. The last words she said to me were: “I can’t be heard on the phone.”
Zanele is not the only student who is scared of increasing levels of violent repression being meted out on supporters of South Africa’s burgeoning student movement.
Almost two weeks ago, a first-year student called her mother in a panic.
She said a comrade of hers was on his way to a safe house.
Members of #OpenStellenbosch were too scared to go home, and were sleeping at each other’s homes.
Mohammed “Mo” Shabangu, the student on his way to sleep at a friend’s home, had good reason to be paranoid.
A voice note he had sent to the national student movement task team leading #FeesMustFall, which comprises two student representatives from each of the country’s tertiary institutions, landed up on a website and trended on Twitter that week.
His uncle, whom he describes as being part of the ANC’s “boys club”, also phoned him that week.
The uncle’s message was clear: “Mo, you are bringing shame upon our family.”
Mo’s reaction to attempts to fight his constitutionally enshrined rights to freedom of expression and of association is unequivocal.
“We are not doing anything illegal, or morally reprehensible. So, I’m not scared of who is listening to this phone call,” he says.
Mo is part of the country’s widening non-aligned youth movement, encouraged by the huge gains made by South Africa’s black liberation movement who achieved the vote for future black generations.
But this seems to be at the root of the state securocrats’ paranoia around the student movement: local government elections are to be held next year.
While Cosas, Nusas and SA Youth Congress (Sayco) structures before 1994 were militant, at a minimum resorting to the tactics now decried by the government and university vice-chancellors, they were hardly a threat to the apartheid regime.
Not even the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, believed its attempts to overcome the apartheid government could compete with that state’s military might.
But today’s students have a significant bargaining chip: they can simply not vote for the ANC next year.
And this is precisely why President Jacob Zuma, speaking at the ANC’s provincial congress in KwaZulu-Natal this weekend, reduces them to mere pawns of what he truly believes is a “third force” intent on regime change.
Frankly, members of #FeesMustFall do want regime change, and there is nothing wrong with that.
They want progressive university management that does not brutalise, beat up and suspend students, who only want a fair chance to get a degree.
They rightly demand degrees that will equip them for a world in which they are already likely to be second best, just because they are black, from Africa, and most of their skills don’t guarantee them prospects of employment.
Should they try life as immigrants, their chances will be limited.
They will be black immigrants in a world that is anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-poor and sexist.
The ANC does itself no favours in writing off legitimate demands by the country’s young people as illegitimate acts of hooliganism and anarchy.
The DA has already proven itself irrelevant in the movement, and individuals like EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu are in denial of how out of their depth they are when they try to engage a much more politically sophisticated generation of radical students.
While Shivambu was once deputy SRC president at Wits University, only a marginal group of pan-African nationalists are convinced by his and EFF president Julius Malema’s fake pro-poor rhetoric.
The only votes they have a small chance of attracting are those of a tiny black petit-bourgeoisie that is so sectarian they hardly know what they want save jobs, land and a leg-up in obtaining the obscene wealth which is held predominantly by a small grouping of whites and beneficiaries of government-sanctioned patronage.
Now, students must make strategic tactical moves in the coming months, including writing their exams and fighting attempts to have them suspended, expelled, and academically and financially excluded.
All of this must be done before the end of this academic year.
And next year they must fill the political vacuum they have laid bare, and show for all to see, their power as an electorate that will not be intimidated or criticised into submission, be the powers political or technocratic, university management or racial chauvinists.
* Not her real name.
@shantiaboobaker