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Wits University vice-chancellor Adam Habib’s hair is considerably greyer today than it was when he started this job just over two years go.
The dramatic standoff between disgruntled students and management over a substantial increase in tuition fees was a poignant display of the failure by the ANC government to implement the educational clause of the Freedom Charter, which states that the doors of learning shall be open to all.
My understanding is that this clause meant the provision of free education, at least for poor black students.
But what we have seen after 1994 is that the cost of tertiary education has soared to unaffordable levels for the majority of black students.
Probably nowhere does the race-class nexus apply more than when it comes to meeting the costs of education at universities. As part of their privilege inherited from apartheid, white students would be more able to meet these costs than would black, coloured and Indian students.
Rather than moving towards making education free or much more affordable for black working class students, education has become explicitly more commercialised and commodified. In other words, education is today a privilege for those who have money to pay for it and not a decommodified right for those who don’t.
But who are these black students who struggle to meet the costs of their education? They are often the sons and daughters of the black working class who built this city to be the richest city on the continent.
It is incumbent upon the ANC government to make university education free – or at least much more affordable – for black students.
How can we bemoan the lack of qualified black people in both the private and public sectors but not pay adequate attention to the funding support that is required to produce them?
The usual government refrain that there are many competing budgetary demands, though true, lacks an appreciation of the strategic centrality of education in not only producing black graduates but its role in building economic and institutional capacity in our society. The economy and society benefit when students are well educated, especially in a country where the skills profile is still overwhelmingly white dominated.
Levelling this playing field is what the ANC must bear in mind when it considers how to respond when deciding how it budgets for tertiary education in future.
How the ANC responds to this funding crisis is also very important politically. The party has already lost a great deal of support among black students at several universities, where it was long dominant, including at Fort Hare, where it was convincingly trounced by the DA earlier this year. Last year, the ANC lost the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in a key historical support base, the Eastern Cape.
The longer it takes to deal decisively with funding problems at universities, the more it is going to lose political support among a very important constituency.
The ANC must do everything in its power to fund black education and give real meaning to the Freedom Charter.
Harvey is a political writer, analyst and author
