Ebrahim Harvey | Government has failed public university students

The student protests at public universities today are rooted in historical failures of the government, with Ebrahim Harvey writing that he holds the ANC government directly responsible for the financial crisis in higher education.

The explosion of militant student struggles at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg over the past week has once again placed the media spotlight on issues which first erupted in 2015 at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I then argued that those events were most probably partly influenced by the furious militancy of the striking black miners at Marikana in 2012 and the dreadful massacre of 34 which took place there.

In fact, both Marikana and the 2015 student protests were the first big explosions of the myth of a "rainbow nation" and the "miracle transition" of the 1990s. Basically, what both Marikana and the student protests, which in 2015 had spread quickly around the country, meant was to show in the most dramatic terms possible the hollowness and essentially falsity of those enduring myths, especially as far as the material conditions and interests of black working-class students are concerned. The vast majority of them, from one year to the next, struggle like hell to pay for their basic needs, such as tuition fees, study materials, accommodation, transport, food and so on.