STUDENT
COUNCILS
Author: Lindokuhle Mponco
The Student in Neo-Apartheid South Africa finds
themselves in a dilemma; go to school and get your qualification without any
hassles, or try and do something about those hassles and face the risk of a
criminal record.
One might ask what these hassles are and why focus
on them instead of getting your degree? The answer is simple; the hassles
differ but in the main include, accommodation; study resources; study
facilities; gender inequality; racism; campus crimes; sexism; gender based
violence and abuse; colonialism; and the biggest problem of them all,
TUITION/FEES/FUNDING. These hassles go on to affect the daily life of the
Student on campus, and off campus.
The Students have for a long time used the tools
given to them by the Institution and the State in general, but it seems like
those tools have become tools of co-opting student representatives into the
wholesale oppression and institutionalization of students; instead of them
being tools of creating a conducive environment for the Student to prosper. The
Student of post 1994 South Africa is being programmed and trained to
rationalise and reason in a ‘certain way’; behave in a ‘certain way’ and live
in a ‘certain way’. These ‘certain ways’ are not ways meant to produce a
critical thinker, a rational worker or a creative citizen; these ‘certain ways’
are meant to turn the Student into a docile being that does what he/she is told
without critically questioning the motives and the outcomes.
This is evidenced in the marking styles of lecturers
who mark aggressively when students present contrarian views, methods, and
theories. Many students can attest to this reality and many of them see this as
nothing but as a means to control the mind and the intellectual creativity of
the Student. Another example is when students develop a view different to
management on student affairs, staff appointments, academics policies etc;
management uses its authority to quell any debate or discontent. An example is
Rhodes University in 2016, whereby female students in the main, protested
against the protection of alleged rapists, who in the main were law students.
The minute Management saw a united front of students taking a decision to take
to the streets and shut down the institution and indirectly the town of
Makhanda, they brought in private security and the police to come and shut the
protest down.
While in public the Management was pretending to be
concerned about the rape scourge at Rhodes University; on the other side they
were applying for interdicts and expelling learners in the name of ‘dealing
with criminal elements’ that had infiltrated the movement against the
protection of rapists, known as the #RUReferenceList. It is a tragic comedy of
events that upon reflection is the epitome of the cold, cruel and cunning
nature of the Institution and the State.
With these two examples and more, historical
experience proves one thing and one thing only; THE INSTITUTION IS AT WAR WITH
THE STUDENT. The Institution serves as the tool of the Neo-Apartheid State to
continue the legacy of Apartheid in a democratic fashion and without the use of
the word Apartheid. The Institution trains the children of the oppressed
classes; who are in the main Black and African, to work for the White Settler capitalist
elite who in most cases happen to be the parents of their classmates and future
bosses. The definition of Black and White in this essay is in accordance with
the Black Consciousness Movement’s ideological posture on the question of who
is black and who can claim blackness; and on the question of whiteness and the
tendency called White Supremacy (For more detailed answers to these questions,
consult the book I Write What I Like).
With the Institution
waging war on the Student on behalf of the State and the capitalist
establishment, the Student finds themselves confronted with the reality of
dying on their feet, or living on their knees. Most students choose the latter
due to the safety of conforming to the status quo while getting your
qualification. The few that have chosen the former are serving prison
sentences, expelled or have criminal records, meaning that for them a job is a
distant reality all because they were fighting against a corrupt machine that
is meant to strangle the life out of them. Students can tell you a litany of
stories on students who took their own lives because of the academic pressures
that come with a toxic and oppressive environment. We see with our own eyes
through this beautiful lens called History that the conditions in the Institution
have differed, but by and largely remained the same due to the nature of the
task it has to carry out.
The Student has tried SRCs, and SRCs keep failing
him/her. The SRC has become nothing but a tool of co-opting student leaders and
representatives to the oppression of their comrades, directly and indirectly.
The revolutionary SRCs on the other hand have been either purposefully sabotaged
or strangled by the Management with the intention of causing a lack of faith in
the currently elected SRC members as a tool to advance the Student in the oppressive
Institution. An example is the story of former Fort Hare student known as Jim
who started a movement called ‘Sodla
Sonke’, which is directly translated to mean the following, ‘We Shall All
Eat’. The purpose of the movement was to ensure every student benefits from the
Institution in terms of material resources relevant for studying and getting
their qualifications; and literal food. The movement was started due to the
notorious incumbency associated with the South African Students’ Congress
(SASCO) at the SRC body. Once The Students realised that SASCO was missing in
action, they joined this movement which won SRC elections at the University of Fort
Hare, Alice campus. He then began to lead and represent the students through this
movement but because Sodla Sonke was
increasing the consciousness of the Student, they sabotaged the movement
through various means, not limited to underfunding the SRC body (this also
happens to be the major flaw of the SRC body that belongs to the Institution).
The Student has tried the Management and Management
keeps excluding him/her on the basis of race, gender, and social class; the
Student tried a broad coalition called #RhodesMustFall and later #FeesMustFall
twice in 2015 and 2016. Both had short term gains but in the main failed to
advance and realise the ideals of the movement. #Shackville in 2016 was the
last kicks of the dying horse with many other movements devolving back to their
campuses of original breakout due to many issues with the main one being defeat
of two of the strongest movements in post 1994 South Africa. Defeat came with
the reality that the main cause of attention and mass consciousness was not the
power and the strength of movements, but it was due to it being primarily
because the movements had finally gripped the former Whites Only/Segregated
campuses.
The Media jumped when it heard of smoke and tires,
and immediately sent their agents who use journalism as the cover for nothing
but being mere stenographers of the capitalist establishment. It was these
agents that broke the story that UCT; WITS; RHODES; UFS; MATIES (Stellenbosch
University); AND TUKS (University of Pretoria) are on fire and immediately once
news broke, everyone in South Africa was seized with panic and fear of things
going pear shaped in these Ivy League institutions. Once peace was restored and
an understanding reached with these ‘prestigious’ institutions, the cause was
deflated by the Media and started being referred to as anarchy clothed in revolutionary
rhetoric and theory.
Students from other institutions joined these waves
of movements - #FeesMustFall in particular – with the aim of advancing student
power and actualising student solidarity. Unfortunately the great teacher
called History sometimes reminds us of parallels and instances similar to this
one, the 1848 French Revolution. In the French Revolution of 1848, class
collaboration manifested itself as it did in 1789 to overthrow the monarchy
which had restored itself after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately
for the working class and the poor the bourgeoisie betrayed them and used that
same power to continue the oppression of the working class and the poor.
Here we see a lesson from History, this lesson is a
repetitive lesson which I call the Theory
of Class Disposal. Here we see
oppressed classes being used by the bourgeois, who were also oppressed but
suffered much less than the workers and the common French citizen. Once the
bourgeois attains power, it disposes the working class and the poor to go and
suffer in silence. The bourgeois and its agents pretend to hear your cries from
down below and make a few cosmetic changes once in a while but in the main the
system stays the same. The oppressed stays the same but the oppressor changes.
In the Soviet Union, once the Bolsheviks were in full control after the civil
war of 1918 - 1921, according to the historical truths presented by Djilas, a
new class emerged known as the Nomenklatura.
The Nomenklatura were bureaucrats
that were members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), who
wrested power from the Soviets and the Central Committee of the party, and then
centralized it to their class. They were then under the guidance of their
‘father’ Joseph Stalin. All key positions were given to them and they had
privileges which in a normal Socialist society would not be tolerated. The Nomenklatura were like the new ‘nobility’
of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union went from being a ‘dictatorship of
the proletariat’ to being a ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’, according to
Trotsky’s analysis. Once again the oppressed classes were disposed once power
was attained by this new class and then turned into subjects of the Nomenklatura, who in turn did not
accumulate material wealth but accumulated privileges and unlimited power. The
Student realised that like his/her other historical counterparts in this soap
drama called Life, he/she was used and disposed once the ‘prestigious’
institutions had calmed their campuses by using various means like violence; terror; and informants, who were the same so called student leaders
of the movement!!!!
The Student realised that his/her grievances were
used by some as a means for magazine covers and parliamentary seats. Once the
Student accepted this reality, they decided to demobilise and depoliticize
themselves not because it was not right for the Student to continue to actively
engage in the struggle against the Institution and the Neo-Apartheid state, but
because of the harsh reality that some students are more equal than others and
that the Institution is too strong for the Student at this present point. These
harsh realities are not the only cause for demobilisation and the rapid
depoliticising university campus, but also the use of State Bodies of Oppression
(a concept introduced by Engels) and the justice system is another cause.
The hallmark
judgement of March 2020 by the East London Magistrates’ Court is a victory for
the Student. No more shall it be that the Student shall be brutally evicted by Private
Security, and Management is now forced to negotiate with the Student before calling
the black boots.This doesn’t mean that Management didn’t negotiate with the
Student; but it means The Management
will stop negotiating in bad faith. This doesn’t mean that the Institution
will not adapt, because like its mother system capitalism, it has the ability
of adapting itself to the different political regimes. The Student has
unfortunately been barred by matters beyond his/her control due to the ongoing
pandemic, to use this judgement as a key weapon in its permanent fight with the
Institution.
The
Institution, like the State, has to be, according to Marx and Lenin, ‘smashed
and destroyed’. According to Engels and Lenin it is a “special force of
suppression for the oppressed class”. In this instance, I have used a Fanonian
method of adapting Marxism to the context of the Student in the Institution.
However do we crush The Institution for it to disappear from society, or we
crush it to reconstitute it albeit in a revolutionary
incarnation/manifestation?
My answer to that question is a resounding yes, we
must crush The Institution to reconstitute to become a Revolutionary Institution
which shall serve the Student, the Worker, and the Academic. I say yes because
the Student would have fulfilled his/her revolutionary task with excellence by
smashing and destroying The Institution, however every system has an
institution and that institution works for the benefit of the system. For every
institution that is born, a system has to exist in order to support those
institutions. Institutions can be tangible or intangible and will always exist
in every political system, ideology or theoretical framework. The trick is in
who does the institution work for? Does it work for the elite of society or
does it work for the masses of society? If it works for the elite against the
masses, it must be destroyed; but if it works for the masses against the elite,
then it must be strengthened and perfected to systematically crush the elite.
Once smashed and destroyed in its previous
manifestation, the ashes of The Institution must be used to build a new
Institution which will work for the Student, the Academic and the Worker. A new
Management with a new mind set and revolutionary conscience must replace the
old Management; with the sole aim of making The Institution work for all. I
feel the need to stress this matter so as to clear up any contradictions
perceived or real. Rebuilding a building that has been destroyed completely to
the ground because of natural disasters or vandalism, and many other things
that cause buildings to be destroyed, requires you to start from scratch with a
new design if you do not seek to recreate the old design. I am sure that the
Student wouldn’t venture into the activity of rebuilding a structure identical
to the previous one unless he/she have been tricked and misled into doing so.
That can only happen if key reps have been converted into agents and operatives
of the oppressive class, or if the revolution has been hijacked by rogue
elements such as the Nomenklatura
phenomena.
Perhaps one may ask that if this is the case then
what is to be done, and what means or rather, which tool should be used in
order to advance the cause of the Student, and ultimately be the voice of the
Student that is seemingly not being heard. My answer is simple and plain;
ESTABLISH STUDENT COUNCILS not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end.
These means do not need to be even justified if the ends don’t turn out
positively due to the nature of the means. The democratic aspect will always
linger in the mind of the revolutionary Student, and will one way or another manifest
itself in a much more radicalized form, with the aim of smashing and destroying
the Institution into smaller pieces than previously imagined and planned. One
may answer back and say but we have SRCs and what differentiates it from the
SRCs. The answer is simple; The Student Council shall exist in a similar
fashion to the Worker Soviets of pre-October Revolution Russia.
The Worker Soviets (Councils) were bodies of the democratic
advancement of the struggle of workers and peasants against Tsarism and the
bourgeoisie in Tsarist and later Provisional Government Russia. They served as
the collective voice of the workers in various Russian cities and towns. These
councils were extremely instrumental in the 1905 Russian Uprising and the two
Russian revolutions of 1917. It would be very intellectually shallow and
ideologically misplaced to oppose the Student Councils on the basis that we are
importing European solutions to an African struggle. When one seriously
analyses the History of the Russian Revolution starting from 1904 – 1917 on the
actual year the revolution finally achieved its task, you find a litany of
similarities albeit different circumstances and material conditions of these
two countries.
It is on this premise we can pick up that the birth
pains were similar, in nature and in kind, even though South Africa is in a far
worse situation than what Russia was in. Especially when you take into
consideration that they were engaged in an ongoing world war just like we have
a unique pandemic which forces us to reconfigure our lifestyle patterns and
standard of living. South Africa has more complex and difficult problems than
what Russia had due to the beast called time and change which manifested itself
in the form of world social movements such as racism; colonialism and its peak
tendency called White Supremacy, which was and still is in a relationship with
White Monopoly Capital. Some will say can’t we find other progressive models in
Africa rather than appropriate a system from Europe, which by the way worked,
in as far as it came to smashing and destroying the state. The answer to this
is simple but tricky, because one realises that every decision we take can put
us in a far worse situation than the one we are in currently. One can use the
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde model of using an informal network of ‘commune
like’ councils and bodies to direct production; supply of edible products for
the guerrillas and so forth. The Guinea-Bissau method progressive as it is, is
not conducive even if adapted to the context of the South African academic
arena. Here we find a system that was conducive for a movement that had taken up
literal arms against the State.
We cannot use the same context because we are not in
a position as Students to pick up literal arms against The Institution. That
can only happen once we have exhausted the use of the Student Councils and have
seen barren results after years if not decades. We must also remember that in
the Institution, a year is equivalent to a dog year in terms of the constantly changing
and advancing socio-political terrain. This fast paced environment needs an
equally fast Student to not only cope with the fight against the Institution
but also defeat it. The Student Council gives us a means to swiftly and
effectively deal with unresolved issues in a particular institution. Gone are
the days whereby Students would wait for a messiah movement to emerge from
amongst them to save them from the oppressive Institution, gone are the days whereby
religious based student organisations will tell them to pray it out, because
they have realised that the same Bible says faith without deeds is futile. I
don’t have an informed perspective on what the Qur’an says about faith and
deeds but I am sure the Qur’an does encourage the Muslim to make it his/her
responsibility to use any means necessary - including the bullet - to solve the
injustice that exists in this world.
The Students have realised that they will have to actively
use their own hidden and potent talents to remove this oppressive Institution
from our midst. It must be equally stressed that what could be us sweeping away
an oppressive Institution could be us sweeping it away only to create a far
worse Institution. Sun Tzu teaches us that we have to choose the ‘best out of
the bad options’, this means all decisions, or rather most decisions are likely
to have a negative outcome but we must choose the best out of these bad options
we have. An example would be having to choose the best phone for your personal
enjoyment and use. All phones have positives and negatives; strengths and
weaknesses; efficiencies and deficiencies but one is still confronted with the
dreadful decision they have to make and that is to choose a phone that will
meet their expectations; preferences; and financial means to purchase one. The
phone of choice is seen as a bad decision out of far worse options, if not
unattainable options in the present time.
The preference of the Student is to be heard,
listened to and attended to appropriately and efficiently. The Student realises
the weaknesses of the SRC in The Institution, the weaknesses of the broad
coalition manifestations and other platforms. The Student doesn’t know what to
do and it is understandable that they don’t know what is to be done. The
Student needs an epiphany or a light bulb moment. This is the light bulb moment
and it is flickering brighter than any other light bulb moment. The Student
Councils must emerge in every town that has an institution of higher learning;
region; and province. Their purpose will be to unite students from across the
different institutions. This means that a future student demonstration on any
issue that has seized the attention of the Student, will have a student from
Fort Hare marching alongside a student from Buffalo City TVET College; a
student from Rhodes University will be marching alongside a student from
Sakhikamva TVET College and it goes on and on.
These Student Councils will be elected indirectly by
the students but control measures and reasons why I have chosen this method
will be thoroughly expounded on and explained in another essay pertaining to
Student Councils. Student councils will have a similar if not the same
hierarchy of the SRC executives. It will be expanded to include non-executive
members, who will hold the Student Council executive to account. The members of
the Student Council will be held to account by the Students through constituency
meetings, mass meetings and a Congress of Student Councils which shall operate
in the same manner as a party conference/congress. This is where all Student
Councils, through delegates of the councils and directly elected students’
delegates who come from various campuses and institutions, who are there to
represent the Student and hold the Student Councils accountable for their work.
The Congress’s main functions will be to report back on decisions taken and the
state of affairs of the Student and the Council; resolve on policy questions
and issues; amend the constitution of the Student Council; elect a national
leadership of the Student Council; and design and coordinate a national
programme for the year to come. The
Student Councils will advance strongly the issue of equitable gender
representation, with the threshold being 50% of the nominee reps and eventually
elected reps being female. NO STUDENT COUNCIL SHOULD BE FORMED IF THIS
REQUIREMENT HAS NOT BEEN MET!!!!
These are some of the very few details I can give in
this essay about Student Councils and another essay will be published as a
follow up to this one. The fact of the matter is that the Student needs a tool
which will not only allow us to ‘jostle the enemy’ as Lenin would say, but a
tool that can in the short term, knock down the enemy; in the midterm, force
the enemy to ask for a time out; and in the long but immediate term, knock the
enemy out for good this time around. The Student Council becomes that tool in
the short term; midterm; and long term.
If the Student has any hope of smashing and
destroying The Institution, then the Student Councils must be elected and
convened with the NECESSARY
REVOLUTIONARY SPEED AND ENERGY. THE STUDENT WILL ATTAIN FULL STUDENTHOOD THE
DAY IT USES THE POWER OF HIS/HER COLLECTIVE MIGHT AND INTELLECTUAL CAPABILITIES.
As The Students, we make this call and
raise our voice in unison and say, ‘ALL POWER TO THE STUDENT COUNCILS!!!’
AMANDLA!!!
QINA MFUNDI!!!
