Durban - After 31 days in jail, a University of KwaZulu-Natal student leader has emerged defiant, insisting students must fight on against unaffordable education.
And the Westville campus SRC president, Lukhanyo “Bhanda” Mtshingana, who also told of his mother’s heartache at seeing him in a prison uniform, has called on parents to join the #FeesMustFall protests sweeping the county.
Mtshingana said he was treated like a criminal for fighting for what he believed was right.
He was arrested on September 15 on a charge of public violence, after a university building was torched and cars destroyed.
He was released last week Thursday after being denied bail in previous court appearances that the media were barred from attending.
Mtshingana, a member of the South African Students Congress was bailed out last Thursday with three other UKZN Westville students for R2 000 each by the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the South African Communist Party.
On his experience of being caged for so long pending bail, he said: “It made me realise that when we enter jail we are all criminals in the eyes of the law, we are treated like rapists and murderers,” he said. Despite the seriousness of the allegations against him Mtshingana is insistent he was not responsible for the damage caused at the university.
“It is a trend at UKZN that every time there are protests they arrest SRC members,” he said. “I went to jail on September 15 just a few days after winning a case against the university where I was found not guilty. We were treated as people who were murderers or rapists.”
Mtshingana was at the Pinetown Regional Court on Thursday to support two other students who had been in jail for two weeks.
Bheki Ntuli from the ANC regional offices in KZN speaks to media about students. #FeesMustFall pic.twitter.com/IhOfjmtDZs
— MojoIOL (@mojoIOL) October 23, 2015
“We were kept in jail so that the university could keep us out of negotiations,” he said. “We will fight for free education and we support the national call for no fee increases, even though there are people who do not believe in it, we will not stop until we get what we want.
“We should not let threats put us down, we should not let people try to neutralise us. It has become a trend in South Africa for people to use our poverty as weakness to make us give up. They will tell you that you have an unemployed parent, they will tell you that you come from undeveloped areas, why are you focusing on politics and protest, why don’t you focus on academics?
“At the end of the day not fighting will not solve anything, we are willing to stand, we are not going to sit back and let our future be destroyed,” he said.
Mtshingana said he watched his mother – who travelled from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape for his court appearances – weep when she saw him in a prisoner’s uniform at Westville Prison.
“It was a difficult situation for my mother, besides the fact that she is a single parent and that she’s unemployed, for her to travel from the Eastern Cape asking for money from relatives to come and see me – her only son – in Westville Prison. She came to visit me and she cried but I told her to be strong,” he said.
Commenting on the violent clash between students and the police in the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town, Mtshingana called for parents to join the #FeesMustFall movement and hit the streets with students.
“I really think parents should take a stand now, at this point it is parents who should say we want to join the fight and we want to fight with our children.
“The clash outside Parliament between police and students is not something that should be happening after 20 years of democracy, there is a difference between students and criminals, what happened there – students were brutally assaulted and we see this all the time at our campus from police and private security, we are arrested for things we don’t know,” he said.
“People will do anything to silence the students and if we silence the students we have no future.”
Daily News
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