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Fees Must Fall
Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa
By Susan Booysen, Monica Seeber Wits University Press
Copyright © 2016 Individual contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86814-987-2
CHAPTER 1
TWO WEEKS IN OCTOBER: CHANGING GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Susan Booysen
'The people have more power than the people in power.'
– Protest placard used in student action outside Parliament, October 2015
'You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness ... it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.'
– Thomas Sankara, in interview with journalist Jean-Philippe Rapp, 1985
INTRODUCTION
The #FeesMustFall student movement that started in late 2015 unleashed social and political power that challenged the established political order, brought university managements to heel, and changed the social fabric of universities and of parts of society. Foundational values were to be reconsidered, and their ideological bases laid bare and cast off; policies were changed and institutions transformed – and the power of direct action to get radical results was affirmed. October 2015, in the main, changed universities, government's relations with the youth, and government itself.
At the height of the national #FeesMustFall (#FMF) revolt, the protest was taken to the seats of power in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria. In Parliament, in the African National Congress's Luthuli House and at the seat of government power, the Union Buildings, the political parties and government braced themselves behind closed doors and security fences. In some instances they were shielded by armed security forces, under siege while the revolt unfolded on the streets.
Policy concessions and revisited practices were foremost among the gains – the students extracted significant compromises, substantial compared to what any opposition party, community protest, internal African National Congress (ANC) formation (such as a province or ANC league), or trade union federation had attained on comparable issues in the recent past. The parameter shifts of sociopolitical culture in South Africa were evident, if less tangible than the concessions on educational policy. The students changed the rules of the universities, held government to account and changed both national fiscal planning and higher education praxis. Even more, they served notice that the 1994 settlement was just the opening of the door and not an achievement in own right – that the sociopolitical compact was no longer carved in stone.
The 2015 student uprising, in a powerful intra-university alliance with workers, had far-reaching impacts, therefore, on government and society. The #FeesMustFall movement – bringing in a new iteration of post-#RhodesMustFall Fallism – started as a protest against the announcement on 4 October 2015 by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) of its planned 10.5 per cent increase in student fees for 2016. Student anger metamorphosed rapidly into a national campaign. It merged with pre-existing thrusts against the oppressions inherent in coloniality and whiteness, as epitomised in the ongoing presence of the colonialist Cecil John Rhodes (by name or figuratively) on several higher education campuses. It fused with long-standing protests against financial exclusions at the historically black universities – the University of Fort Hare and the Tshwane University of Technology, for example, had been protesting long before the 2015 Fallist movements found their feet. The campaign burgeoned into a powerful mass-solidarity student movement targeted at university managements and national government. The solidarity of action turned out to be short-lived, but the implementation of concessions, the student insistence on full implementation and the general impact of the revolt remained.
This chapter investigates in broad strokes the nature and level of change wrought by #FMF. It questions whether the revolt against the prevailing sociopolitical order – especially as it was manifested in higher education – approached 'revolutionary change' in the sense of a social revolution or merely far-reaching change across education and education-worker sectors. It questions whether it is set to be a continuous process of change or whether the movement has become so diversified, infiltrated by political parties, and pulled in irreconcilable ideological directions that its historical significance is fading. The chapter has a particular focus on how the events in the early stages (roughly the eight-month snapshot from October 2015 to June 2016) affected governance. I argue that at this early stage certain impacts are evident, while longer-term influences are still to be concretised. After unpacking the first eight months of the revolt in terms of changes in governance, the chapter develops and then applies an analytical framework. Methodologically, it draws on direct observation of the student action, listening to the unfolding narratives, studying the emerging literature and interpreting the sources.
THE PARTY POLITICAL NON-PARTISAN SETTING OF THE REVOLT
Assessing the student revolt's impact on governance in South Africa is inseparable from party politics, either by 'association with' or due to 'distance from'. The relatively non-partisan nature of the October 2015 phase of #FMF, together with the ANC's closeness to the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), helped to get the ANC government to compromise on fee increases and student funding. Much of the revolt originated from the children of the 1994 liberation, many of whom were specifically associated with the ANC's student structures. The ANC and its government had to settle, appease and halt the party political migration of its support base and contain anti-systemic action and the erosion of its hegemony. The ANC strategy, as it unfolded, was to own the October phase (and attach its fees and funding concessions to this peak period), and disown the continuation of the struggle (see Nkwanyana 2016).
Herein lay some of the keys to explaining the governance-related impact of the revolt, which is also the theme in the rest of the chapter: the protest had a radical thrust and challenged socio-political-economic fundamentals, yet it was not an outright rejection of the legitimacy of the regime (see also Booysen 2013) or its ideological compromises. The ANC and its government therefore had to play to a strategic middle-ground of concede-capture-control, recognising the explosive potential of the revolt and the threat that it could move beyond control – as it did in fact for a week or two (see also De Kadt 2015).
The young generation had been accumulating reservoirs of malcontent. Something had to give way. The young and the impatient, joined by some university workers and academic staff, came to speak truths to power in ways that demanded attention. They trampled on the myth of the miracle of South Africa's 1994 political settlement and overruled the dogma that the former liberation movement turned governing party, the ANC, was fulfilling the 'rainbow promises' of 1994. Coming from backgrounds of post-1994 poverty and/or socioeconomic exclusions, the student youth of 2015 rebelled against a cluster of higher education grievances: unaffordability and hence lack of access (direct and indirect, formal and informal) for the poorest and the unbearable position of the 'missing-middle', too well-off to get public funding yet unable to afford university life. As the authors of Chapter 7 remark regarding student protests elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa: 'Universities became the sites where broader sociopolitical grievances were projected and transferred into more precise localised calls for transformation of educational institutions.' The grievances in the case of South Africa were 'compressed' (as conceptualised inChapter 7) and nationalist and neoliberal struggles were contemporaneous. Once the 1994 rainbow faded, the struggles were compressed further, combining with the pressures of intersectionalism, and generalised, beyond structural adjustment economic desperation. The lens of ongoing and intersectional oppressions and alienation due to colonial and apartheid legacies focused the part of the revolt that went beyond the tangible fees/funding issue. Beyond the traditional race and class filters, the students also saw the denial of spaces for intergender and feminist voices, affecting the LGBTIAQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual and queer) community.
In a powerful twist on protest against the dual targets of the ruling class's complacency and the tolerated residues of apartheid and colonialism, the protesting youth projected themselves regularly as the neglected 'children of the ANC'. Narratives centred often on the 'condition of the black child', 'black pain', the 'suffering of the children of the workers', and the students' concern about workers as their emblematic 'mothers and fathers'. In Chapter 6 in this volume, David Everatt sees this as 'victimhood'. It is, even more powerfully, anger directed into mobilisation to fight against the delivery and transformational (by now, decolonisation) deficits in the 1994 expectations. This is also to be balanced against the possibility that for many students the revolt was about ensuring their own middle-class ascendance.
The #FMF narratives were complex and strategically calculated. The 2015 narratives were concentric to ANC standpoints yet also projected assertive black consciousness. They positioned the critical mass of students on the side of the ANC government, in a precarious way at a time of cross-class and race solidarity – and before party political alignments resurfaced from roughly November 2015 onwards (also described by Naidoo 2016b: 186–188). Amid tones of black consciousness the narratives voiced angry reminders to the generation of 'liberators' that the youth requires them to make good on the 1994 liberation promises. If not, the revolt gave notice that the rising class of post-secondary-education youth might realign, away from the former liberation movement, and create political homes for themselves in opposition parties or anti-systemic political organisations.
The political parties and their student wings – especially at the height of the October phase of the protest – were forced to keep their distance. A Democratic Alliance (DA) leader, Helen Zille, had to be escorted away from protesting Stellenbosch students. Their message to Zille was 'Voetsek [also 'Futsek' on some posters], you aren't here for us' (News24 2015). It contrasted with the #FMF students' relative closeness to the ANC (although the ANC at Wits had sometimes to meet students clandestinely) and high levels of tolerance for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The EFF was centrally positioned, and pro-EFF students drove the protests in many locations, including in the #OutsourcingMustFall phase. Black First Land First (BLF, the Andile Mngxitama offshoot from the EFF) and the Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) were active, working to sustain the radical wing of the revolt and propelling a left surge in the slipstream of the revolt.
The ANC's PYA student structure – comprising generally the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), Young Communist League (YCL), Congress of South African Students (Cosas), South African Students Congress (Sasco) and the Muslim Students' Association (MSA) – was foremost in many of the campus struggles. The EFF's student command structures were leading the revolt (mostly in non-partisan presences) at many sites. Equally, the Pan-Africanist Congress's Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania (Pasma) mobilised both before and during the revolt at many of the campuses. They were radically pro-poor and black consciousness. The DA's Democratic Alliance Student Organisation (Daso) was virtually absent from the 2015 revolt, despite its focus on the black middle class (disproportionately represented on campuses). #FMF was a black-led struggle for radicalism and it brought together the black underclasses in solidarity with the black middle class and a sprinkling of radical white middle class. The 2015 revolt was simply not doing liberalism, even if that ideology in all probability did well among the passive numerical majorities on many of the campuses.
FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS IMPACT ON GOVERNANCE
My analysis uses three main categories of impact and governance change: foundational and ideological reconsideration; policy and institutional change; and modes of political action (Table 1.1). The analysis recognises differences across the locality of campus and type of higher education institution – it draws out the most tangible changes and trends concerning phenomena that were often unevenly realised at different sites yet cohered to constitute generalised trends.
In terms of foundational and ideological impact, the student action induced important forms of reconsideration of the status quo. It questioned the legitimacy of the convenient social compact that emerged from the transitional negotiations of the early 1990s, culminating in the Constitution of South Africa of 1996. Concerns about the ANC's compromises at the time re-emerged in the contemporary student narratives, by now in aggravated form and from young people who had the lived experience (an essential part of the narrative) of continuous poverty, inequality and disappointing opportunities. Substantial numbers of the black youth had risen above these conditions, but emphasised their solidarity and helped lead the revolt.
The debate on insufficient levels of societal change had in the preceding two decades already been legitimised by the ANC in its public narratives around the ANC in government having failed to deliver more definitive change. The ANC had been positioning itself as a leader of this game of identifying apartheid and colonialism to this day as the leading causes of the deferred revolution. In the time of the second Zuma term, 2014 onwards, it increasingly reinvented the liberation struggle – prolonging liberation and propelling liberation narratives into the present, pleading minimal agency in terms of what was not delivered in the first twenty-two years of democracy. Achille Mbembe (2016b) similarly argued (on the ANC positioning itself as both government and protester) regarding the #FMF mobilisation at the Union Buildings and mayhem caused by ANC-aligned youth in breaking down fences and burning portable toilets in the course of street battles: '... if you go to Pretoria you are going against the government. You are going against the ruling party, but then the ANC turns around and says, we are with you ...' The students had the benefit of a platform prepared by the ANC, although they used it with more radical intent; their positions on decolonisation, racism and gender transformation amplified their grievances about the foundations of South African society. The student movement also forged reinvigorated ideological critiques, infused with threads of black consciousness, African nationalism and criticisms of the preceding political-economic orders.
The second part of foundational impact relates to the ANC government's mode of operations in a zone of consensual, piecemeal, gradualist policy and delivery. Up to the time of the student revolt (and in some respects thereafter) the ANC government was accustomed to arguing that strategies, policies and plans were in place, that delivery was proceeding (and it always had statistics, even if ambiguously framed, to back up the trend) and that just a touch of patience was needed before delivery would reach even more people. These ANC narratives have been evident in, for example, its election campaigns and, as government, in the president's State of the Nation addresses. The students differed. They forced the ANC government into immediate and far-reaching policy reconsideration in higher education, and gave notice that change in other sectors required urgent attention.
Policy and institutional impact constituted a second category of evidence of change to governance. The students extracted specific public policy changes on the delivery of higher education, and forced policy amplification and implementation that required far-reaching national budgetary reprioritisation. Government had to make good the expectations of the children of the 1994 transition to access free, quality higher education that is relevant to black lives. In the process of insisting on their demands being met (see Table 1.2 on demand progression in the revolt) students successfully challenged the offices of both the president and the minister of higher education and training. Their immediate targets, however, were at the university level. In an Althusserian view (Althusser 2014) of the universities as extensions of the state apparatuses, students subverted the authority of university councils, senates and – at the later, beyond-solidarity phase of the revolt – also the authority of student representative councils (SRCs). The students, as the first line of attack, thus held the universities to account (see also February 2015) for continuously colonial, apartheidist and neoliberal institutional and educational cultures that brought exclusion and alienation at university level.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fees Must Fall by Susan Booysen, Monica Seeber. Copyright © 2016 Individual contributors. Excerpted by permission of Wits University Press.
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