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Newsmaker – Justice Yvonne Mokgoro: Calming the campus storms

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Former Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro during an interview with City Press
PHOTO: Lucky Nxumalo
Former Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro during an interview with City Press PHOTO: Lucky Nxumalo

Perhaps it was her experiences as a student during frequent protests and shutdowns at the University of Bophuthatswana in the 1970s that prompted former Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro to help.

The 65-year-old, who served on the Bench of the country’s highest court between 1994 and 2009, announced the launch of Access Thuto, in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela and Ahmed Kathrada foundations.

Last Friday, she said the new body was established to mediate between students and management to soothe continuing tensions at universities around issues of funding, accommodation and transformation.

Two universities have since taken her up on the offer, but she’s not saying which ones.

“We don’t want people to misunderstand our intervention. It is not to move in there and bring solutions to the issues. Universities are institutions for higher learning and basically are autonomous institutions – they have been dealing with issues of transformation for the past 20 years and indeed a lot has been done,” she told City Press this week.

“Our intervention is to facilitate dialogue with a view to creating trust and confidence, getting us to sit around the table and try to communicate so that we can pursue institutional transformation.”

Mokgoro, who comes from Galeshewe outside Kimberley, says her own studies at Unibo, now North-West University’s Mahikeng Campus, were interrupted over similar protests. She thinks parallels can be drawn between today’s protests and the student activism of the 1970s.

Many of the issues, she says, are the same.

“We went to varsity at a time when there were scholarships available from the private sector. And then there were also state loans you could access based on your academic performance. I got a scholarship and, later, a state loan and, of course, my studies were disturbed by similar student struggles. The idea then was to close down institutions and send us all home.”

Her parents had no idea she was even going to university.

“I remember when I had to leave for campus, I asked my mum to get me a suitcase from my grandma. My grandmother had a metal trunk suitcase.

“She asked, ‘What do you want to do with it?’ and I said I was going to varsity. ‘How are you going to get there?’ she asked. It was a question of train fare and a registration fee.

“The Rotary Club had given me a scholarship – very minimal – and I could register with their money. Thereafter, I got a state loan, which I never repaid. Nobody ever required it from me.”

For Mokgoro, the #FeesMustFall movement and the problems the students are raising are about transformation.

“There is no doubt about that,” she says.

But she believes universities must stay open.

“I don’t see it as a justification to shut down universities – not at all. If we want education, then we must keep the doors of education open, but at the same time deal with transformation issues. We must deal with them, but we cannot delay education,” she says.

Despite the current student movement’s widespread rejection of the rainbow nation ideal of former president Nelson Mandela, Mokgoro tells City Press she still believes South Africans need to fiercely pursue the dreams they created for themselves in 1994.

“We need to learn from what has been done and what has not been done in the past 20 years. We must take our lessons from there. And I don’t think that because we haven’t made sufficient progress, we should give up on transformation and nation-building.

“We have not achieved what we had thought by now we would have, and maybe this is time for us to decide how to change our strategy.”

On the growing intervention of police and private security on campuses, Mokgoro calls for caution.

“I know police tend to view violence on campus as a responsibility they have because they identify and define that as criminal activity. But I think we need to act cautiously,” she says. “I know sometimes students feel they are not being sufficiently listened to.”

After works of art were burnt at the University of Cape Town and statues around the country fell, Mokgoro thinks there may still be a place for symbols of the past.

“We must learn from past negativity and past positivity. I always say there are negative and positive things to learn,” she says.

“Even if it is just a reminder of where we come from, we may need those statues. Even if it’s just a reminder of never, ever again. We need to be reminded of where we come from.

“So while we get angry and despondent, we must rise and pursue our objectives. We cannot give up on them.”

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