http://socialistaction.org/s-african-students-win-first-big-victory/
S. African students win first big victory
Published November 12, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Nov. 2015 S. Africa
By PATRICK BOND
— DURBAN — An historic victory over South African neoliberalism was won
on Oct. 23, after the most intense three-week burst of activist
mobilization here since liberation from apartheid in 1994.
University students have been furious, as their cry “Fees must fall!”
rang out on campuses and sites of political power across this society.
But though there will be an effective 6% cut in tuition for 2016, the
next stage of struggle looms, with demands for free tertiary education
and university labor rights atop the agenda.
The #FeesMustFall movement’s first victory comes at a time that the
African National Congress (ANC) ruling party confronts unprecedented
economic pressure and social unrest. GDP growth will be only 1.5% this
year and probably the same next year, lower than population growth. This
is the most unequal of any major country, and the official poverty rate
(at $2/day) has recently risen to 53%.
The World Economic Forum last month judged the South African working
class as the most militant on earth—the position amongst 140 countries
held since 2012, when 34 mineworkers were massacred at Marikana—and the
police reported recently that last year, nearly 2300 protests turned
“violent” (in police terminology). The deregulated corporate elite
enjoys the world’s third highest profits, yet remains intent on looting
the economy at a rate as fast as any. All these measures have amplified
since the ANC took power in 1994.
The desperation flash point this month was the announcement of
double-digit increases in university tuition fees. Students demonstrated
not only against local managers at more than a dozen campuses. Their
organizations united across the ideological spectrum, from socialist to
nationalist to even the center-right student wing of the main opposition
party, and hit national targets.
The trajectory through race to class
They began by storming the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town on Oct.
21, then marched to the Johannesburg and Durban headquarters of the ANC
on Oct. 22 and 23, and finally demonstrated—more than 10,000 strong—at
President Jacob Zuma’s office in Pretoria on Oct. 23.
There, restraining fences were torn down by some of the activists, and
tyres and latrines were burned, with police once again responding by
using stun grenades, rubber bullets, and water cannons. Refusing to come
out to address the crowd, instead Zuma held a press conference where he
conceded to the students’ main demand: no fee increase for next year (in
spite of general price inflation expected to be 6%).
The current insurgency began last spring with sporadic acts of fury. At
the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, small groups of students
burnt an administration building and nearby cars, and students were then
caught bringing human excrement on campus presumably for throwing, a
tactic used successfully six months earlier to catalyse the dismantling
of a hated statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
That was the #RhodesMustFall movement. Within a few weeks of a “poo
protest,” in which excrement was hurled at the prominent likeness of
19th-century colonial mining lord Cecil Rhodes, thousands cheered [in
April 2015] when the statue was removed from the scenic campus.
But their other demands for university transformation and
“decolonization”—racial equity, a different campus culture, curriculum
reform to promote Africanization, labor rights for low-paid workers,
more indigenous African professors (there are only five out of more than
250 senior faculty at Cape Town)—were unsuccessful.
After a breather, at UCT and Johannesburg’s University of the
Witwatersrand (“Wits”), the country’s two traditional sites of
ruling-class reproduction, student protests revived this past month. Of
the 19 tertiary institutions that erupted in protest, these two were the
best organised, most sustained and non-violent, mainly using the tactic
of entrance blockades, then moving to the nearby arterial roads.
Disciplined student leaders emphasized non-violent civil disobedience,
with white students often taking place on the front line of struggle as
buffers, given their skin privilege. Worsening police brutality and
occasional clashes with higher-income drivers who tried driving through
the blockades did not deter the activists.
On Oct. 21, inside Cape Town’s Parliament House, the opposition Economic
Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) support for their cause came before Finance
Minister Nhlanhla Nene delivered his medium-term budget speech, which
EFF leaders ardently tried to postpone, before being forcefully evicted.
Outside, thousands of courageous students broke through a fence and
nearly made their way into the main hall where Nene was holding forth.
But although there is still plenty of scope for fiscal expansiveness,
Nene’s budget was heartless: no new money for universities (just
condemnation of “unconstructive” student protests), and a tokenistic
$0.75/month rise in grant payments to the poorest pensioners and
disabled people (who currently receive $105/month). Nene dishonestly
claimed that this plus a prior tiny raise offered in February are “in
line with long-term inflation.”
Since the inflation rate for poor people is much higher than the norm
due to the far higher share of faster-inflating food, housing, and
electricity costs in their budgets, in reality he imposed a 2% cut.
Nene did find funds for a three-year $63 billion infrastructure program
whose major projects promote, first, exceptionally destructive coal
exports mainly by multinational corporations; second, the Durban
port-petrochemical complex’s expansion; and third, iron-ore exports. Yet
there is vast world over-capacity in coal, shipping and steel, with
South Africa’s second major steel producer barely avoiding bankruptcy
last month. But these White Elephant mega-projects continue to get the
lion’s share of state, parastatal and private infrastructure funding.
The influence of big business on Nene’s budget team is blatant: for
example, the world’s largest mining house, BHP Billiton, still gets
electricity at 1/10th the price of ordinary consumers. Corporate tax
evasion and illicit financial flows are now notorious. Nene made a down
payment on nuclear reactors worth $100 billion, as well as the first
funding tranche for another pro-corporate investment, the BRICS New
Development Bank, whose target capitalisation (spread among five
countries) is $100 billion.
Credit-rating agencies & a “communist” minister
Whether seen through the eyes of students, workers, the poor, women and
environmentalists, Nene’s budget begs for intensified social struggle.
Oct. 21 was, however, the first time that a major spontaneous protest
targeted the finance minister at such a sensitive moment. For Nene, the
only objective appeared to be appeasing the banks’ credit-ratings agencies.
As Reuters reported, Nene “downplayed the effect of university students
storming parliament as he delivered his medium term budget on the credit
rating of Africa’s most advanced economy. ‘What matters for the ratings
agencies is our response as government in addressing these challenges,’
he said about the students’ demands to keep tuition fees unchanged.”
Government’s response was a combination of widely condemned police
brutality and ineffectual seduction by the ruling alliance’s left flank,
especially the SA Communist Party, whose leader Blade Nzimande is also
Minister of Higher Education. He was shouted down by protesters outside
parliament when he tried to explain why their demand was unrealistic and
they would face a 6% increase.
Nzimande’s 2013 Ministerial Committee for the Review of the Funding of
Universities found “the amount of government funding is not sufficient
to meet the needs of the public university system. … Government should
increase the funding for higher education, to be more in line with
international levels of expenditure.” But Nzimande had refused to
release a 2012 commissioned study on how to finance free tertiary education.
A boost to anti-austerity activism
Students simply refused to accept Nzimande’s 6% tuition rise. So the
march on Pretoria two days later—and threat of a full storming of Zuma’s
office—must have been the decisive factor in the state’s reversal.
Although the cost of deferring a tuition increase is estimated at
between $150 and $300 million, by making this concession Zuma has given
encouragement to many more protests and Pretoria marches in future.
For those in the society watching and rooting for the students, this was
a critical moment, perhaps ultimately as important as the breakthrough
Treatment Action Campaign fight for free AIDS medicines 15 years ago.
For as Nene signalled, a more damaging period of austerity looms. Thanks
to Nene’s tight-fistedness, there will be a relatively small budget
deficit (3.3% of GDP), but financial commentators are full of threats
about South Africa’s following Brazil’s recent downgrading to a
junk-bond rating by Fitch, Standard&Poor’s and Moody’s, the creditors’
cruel rating agencies.
The class war rages on. Other student demands remain outstanding: free
tertiary education for poor and working people as the overall goal, and
an end to labor casualization and outsourcing for low-paid university
workers. Many such workers barely receive $100/month, and with a poverty
line of $60/person/month, raising a family on starvation wages is
impossible.
The task of retaining this visionary student-worker alliance in coming
weeks and maintaining a national presence will be as difficult as is the
multi-class “United Front” organizing now underway. Difficult yes, but
now, nothing seems impossible in this exceptional site of class struggle.
Patrick Bond is with the UKZN Centre for Civil Society in Durban. He
co-authored the new book “Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism,
Neo-liberalism and the Search for Social Justice.” A version of this
article appeared in CounterPunch.
Photo: Some 10,000 rallied in Pretoria on Oct. 23 in the largest student
protest since the anti-aparthied demonstrations of 1976. Ihsaan Haffejee
/ Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
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Posted in Africa, Black Liberation, International, students. | Tagged
ANC, South Africa.
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