Hope Is Not An Action Plan

If ever there is a lesson in any struggle – individual or group and regardless of where you stand in that struggle – the lesson is that hope is not an action plan. For things to change or remain the same (to suit the status quo), a notable level of effort is required.

Privilege Must Fall; my inaugural article in this very column in October last year was inspired by South Africa’s #FeesMustFall student-led movement. Exactly twelve months later here we are again; at square one, like maybe struggles are some meteorological condition of the year. 

Only, it seems the year long orbit has given birth to an intensified raging struggle. It’s not surprising really that today we’re in an uglier space than we were when all this began in 2015. 

The intervention made by South Africa’s powers that be to freeze annual tuition fee increase for 2016 no doubt brought hope that the issue of affordability and by extension accessibility for all to education, was receiving the attention it deserved.

In fact, the welcome intervention further gave hope that there was recognition that addressing the matter at such high political level was long overdue. Promises were made to students that there would be further and thorough engagement on their cause in order to avoid it sprouting with bigger thorns in future. 

Yet here we are today with at least one life lost during the militant uprisings because it’s clear as has always been to many a procrastinator; that hope is not an action plan – that promises cannot be accepted the same way that a half empty glass is appreciated.

Structural Change

It’s clear there was no committed engagement on the issue over the past year as promised, otherwise students would have been the first, along with the minister of higher education, to know that there would be an 8% cap on university fee increases for 2017. 

Only now, after being forced to shut down, universities, including the University of Cape Town are doing what they should have done between October 2015 and 2016; engaging all stakeholders on the issue.

Some people have been quick to dismiss the students as spoilt brats with entitlement issues because according to the minister, the cap means that up to 75% of undergraduate students will benefit and not be affected by any hike in fees. 

But the struggle was never just about fees; the students made this clear last year already and it was acknowledged by President Zuma when he addressed them after they’d marched to his Union Buildings. 

President Zuma announced that government would lead a process that would go “wider” than fees, “In the long term, there is a package of issues that was raised at the meeting that needs to be followed up. These include free education, institutional autonomy, racism and what the students call ‘black debt’, to mention a few,” said Zuma.

So as parents and concerned citizens, when we criticize the student protests are we in effect saying these other day-to-day African struggles of transformation as raised by the students are invalid? Do we want to rather heed the ever-present call to just “move on”?  

Are we ready to organize ourselves as parents to take a collective stand either closely beside the student s or at the opposite end at a distance? Are we ready to question the African Union on why it prioritized issuing of an African passport over crafting and agreeing on education concessions for African students?

(In)Convenient Truths

Bringing the African Union in this debate is one of the reasons I deliberately refer to WE in a few instances above because it is important to recognize the #FeesMustFall movement as a struggle that is not peculiar to South Africa.  

I know how easy it is to dismiss such struggles as far-removed from oneself. As a student at the University of Swaziland I would be the first to leave campus to whenever fellow students embarked on a protest because I’d decided that what was being demanded had very little to do with me if at all. In fact, I found the almost yearly protests to be inconvenient and disruptive to my studies; the students were just delaying me.

This is what some of the 2016 students and their sympathizers have been saying; that those who are due to complete their studies are being delayed and inconvenienced by #FeesMustFall. 

It’s a valid point to some degree but we all know how costly convenience can be in the long term. Think of the high price you pay when buying condoms or alcohol at a Convenience Store at an inconvenient hour of the night compared to the price you would have paid at a supermarket or Bottle Store at a godly hour. Planning saves a lot of pennies and pains.

I say WE because the spillover of such a social issues is inevitable. For Swaziland in particular, we know too well the number of our citizens who migrate in droves to study in South Africa each year.

For those who have studied or have had children studying in South Africa, we know too the cost implications as university financial demands for ‘foreign’ students are not only made for tuition but also for medical insurance and these must all be presented upfront at registration.

This is a problem because with a scenario such as the euro/lilangeni exchange rate, it means that a Wits University education becomes more easily accessible for an Italian from Italy than for a Swazi child just three hours away from Johannesburg or even a Soweto child. 

The reverse has never been true for Africans wanting to study in Europe. These are some of the structural regulations that cannot be hoped away. 

We all clearly need the ‘decolonized education’ that the students demand in order to enforce the necessary structural change at all levels as we chart our way forward at least for the sake of Africa’s future generations.