The youth and student movement at WSU

The youth and student movement at WSU represents the aspirations of our predecessors in struggle, who taught us that revolutions are, indeed, both activities and festivals of the oppressed and the young. It is the heir of the fighting legacies of the likes of Peter Mokaba, to whom we bowed our heads during the anniversary of his death on June 9th.

This current cadre of militant organisers and scholars represents, in my view, the most reliable section of the youth and student movement in the country at present.

The movement at WSU, against extremely challenging obstacles, to some extent managed to surface from a pile of moral excrements that, for years, accumulated as the toxic waste products of a dysfunctional system previously administered by criminals and neo-liberal black professionals who, over the years, hollowed out the developmental fabric and siphoned this institution out of much-needed funding.

Too little has been written about the post-colonial higher education sector

This article seeks to share some observations, experienced from the ground. Too little has been written about the post-colonial higher education sector in recent years since the dust of the fallist euphoria settled. And because the epicentres of the fallist movements, such as #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, etc, were the previously whites-only universities, obviously, too little was written about the previously blacks-only and Bantustan universities even then.

This is a perspective from that section of the higher education sector and is largely informed by the insights gained at iYunivesithi Walter Sisulu in Mthatha (EC) during that eventful term of Professor Songca (former VC). Between 2022 and today, coupled with some background research, the writer made his observations.

We must first admit

  1. That the WS student movement won many gains and concessions from the management that would have otherwise been delayed if it were not for the bravery of this current cohort of militants, and we must commend the mass mobilisation and the high levels of unity that those students demonstrated as they fought to defend the democratic gains of the national liberation.
  2. The precariousness of the past four years or so at WS has once again exposed the weaknesses of the current state of governance at the previously-black institutions such as WS (Mgwebi), MUT (Sibiya), UNIVEN (Nthambeleni), Fort Hare (Buhlungu), and others. The generalized condition of vulnerability that persists prompts us to make the question: is the intellectual strata and political class of the post-colonial native world designed to withstand the harsh requirements of management and administration, or are they mere regurgitations of foreign textbooks meant to reproduce scholars, teachers, organizers and writers that will manage the waves of liberation instead of the new institutions that make up the architecture of our democratic state?
  3. Many have answered this question before we asked it ourselves. There is no real consensus, and thus it remains a riddle fitting for the careful auspices of this current generation. However, our concern is WS, the Transkei, and South Africa.

My current interactions with the management at this institution bear lessons

  1. The administration at WS has made progress in the areas of infrastructure development, branding, and internationalisation of the digital infrastructure. The quality, quantity, content, credibility, and output of the academic enterprise have also improved. The administrative and operational organs have been restored to a level of well-being that renders an amount of functionality which can be easily shocking to the naïve eye, considering our horrible reputation.
  2. However, at this rate, this foundation will only hold sandcastles. (a). This foundation is being trampled upon by the structural crisis of an institution that is on the periphery of the mainstream higher education sector. (b). This is reinforced by the continuation of the spatial apartheid-Bantustan social engineering that perpetuates our position in the previous Bantustans and the periphery of the urban-industrial economy. (c). All this, in the global context of our position (South Africa) as a semi-peripheral neocolonial capitalist economy that continues on a trajectory of an unbeneficiated, export-driven and heavily financialised pit-to-port economy.
  3. The management philosophy and outlook of the native intellectual and political class remain characteristic of the sell-out positions of the emerging black middle class that Fanon describes in “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”. The betrayal of the democratic-developmental project in favour of free-market values, “international standards” and neoliberal intellectual trends, reinforces the poverty of will to transform institutions such as WS. The black academia and professional strata appear incapable of resolving the super-structural national problems but are preoccupied with the empirical manifestations of the root causes of institutional stagnation, financial non-viability and collapse.
  4. The lack of strong working-class institutions and/or their absence in the higher education sector delays INSOURCING and prolongs the scourges of TENDERISATION. The tenderisation of WSU has exposed the institution, staff, and students to parasitic criminal syndicates and business interests that seek only to siphon crucial funds away from the infrastructure objectives of the university into their pockets. In our assessment, we have diagnosed these mafia-like links to be conglomerates rooted in the taxi-construction-student accommodation-private security complex of the Eastern Cape. In their internal squabbles and scrambles for tenders and profits, the mafia-like cliques infiltrate trade unions, student organisations, SRCs, professional associations, and local business bodies for the sole purpose of soliciting favours, bribes, and advantageous contracts, but deliver sub-standard services to the institution and its students once those tenders/contracts are awarded to them.
  5. As a consequence, the beneficiaries of these mafia-like links, who are mainly student leaders, university staff, and NSFAS officials, enter into factional battles and weaponise their positions in the institutional hierarchy to pursue their equally greedy opponents and secure their personal financial favours. Hence, I view our INSTABILITY as the natural progression of the palace politics and battles for managerial positions that seek only to protect the interests of business interests, greedy staff members, and power-hungry student leaders.
  6. Hence, infrastructure is collapsing due to poor maintenance and unfavourable warranty conditions for appliances and equipment. Hence, the student transport and accommodation services are always sub-standard and never improved despite the numerous complaints lodged by students. Hence, private security and cleaning companies are recycled across our campuses despite complaints of sub-standard services and continued brutalisation of students.
  7. These are the root causes of the problems of this university. These are the underlying mechanisms that generate the annual festivities that have rendered WS the protest centre of the country, and recently, crippled the academic calendar, and lost us an entire semester this year.
  8. The organisational capacity and institutional framework of the youth and student organisations across the political spectrum have been severely hollowed out by a disgustingly persistent state of lull. The gains of the democratic dispensation in the higher education sector have been sufficient to discredit the urgency to intensify political struggles and advance further gains in that sector. The students are living in relative comfort in residences compared to a few years back. Access to the system has incredibly expanded and has become easier to access than it was a few years ago. Funding options have also expanded in scope and quantity and have become more reliable. While these are feats to be celebrated, they have had a biphasic knock-out effect on the overall energy and effectiveness of the student movement. Such that, there is both disillusionment in the national political system among general students, as well as a gross level of comfort among student leaders at a campus level. While there is general political apathy nationally, there are the sins of incumbency at the campus level, resulting in the abandonment of political activism, the collapse of political structures, and the weakening of student governance systems. Without the aforementioned systems, there is no effective oversight or influence that can be applied to the university management to deter the concerted assaults on the developmental projects of the post-colonial university.

It is the foundation that the previous administration at WS built

It is the foundation that the previous administration at WS built that has reopened opportunities for parasitism. The rebuilding of reserves, the massive infrastructure projects, the wide-scale digitalisation and internationalisation, and the expansion and diversification of the institution’s enterprise into many sectors of economic society re-invited the vultures back to WS when they thought they had finished the meat and left only bone. It is the very essence of capitalism that has opened up such misadventures in the industry of knowledge production.

The entangling of the institutions of knowledge production and culture with mainstream industries and bourgeoisie social economy is an inevitable circumstance given the need for capitalism to perpetuate itself, reproduce itself, remodel itself, and reform itself in accordance with the historic moment. In post-colonial society, capitalism appears as neo-liberalism in its political form and thus requires an economic form that is not as grossly wicked as industrial capitalism but exploits wage-labour using state institutions as conveyor belts of capital and vehicles of profit accumulation.

Institutions such as Walter Sisulu University have fallen victim to neoliberal capitalism, and the complacency of the black intellectual strata, academia, professionals, and the political class poses a serious threat to the developmental roles of these previously black-only institutions. To remedy this disaster requires a strong socialist movement rooted in the working-class-student alliance on the ground. The call for socialism is the only responsible slogan for the agitation of the masses to struggle for free, quality education for all. It is only through socialism that our goal of free universal education can be attained. The emerging black capitalist and middle class is incapable of leading the national democratic revolution towards completing this task.

The case of WS calls for working-class leadership of the NDR, now!

It is necessary sometimes to take one step backwards to take two steps forward. V.I. Lenin, 1904

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This is an opinion contribution. The views expressed are the author’s own.