SILAMBILE AND SIFUNA UKUFUNDA
BY
THE
HUNGRY & BLOCKED STUDENTS
Status
quo
There are ghosts scaring the
students at the University of Fort Hare. These ghosts have been scaring and
intimidating the students for quite some time, however, at this point they have
become even more scarier. These unfriendly ghosts are called hunger, and its
evil twin financial exclusion.
These two twins have been
running rampant and the ghostbusters who are supposed to make sure these ghosts
are banished from the land of the living are twiddling their thumbs pretending
not to see the trauma these ghosts are causing. The ghostbusters are a group of
student leaders called the SRC, and the political organisations that deployed
them there. The current SRC is an interim SRC which came to life because of the
COVID-19 pandemic which started in March 2020. The pandemic kept us locked at
home and away from this institution. This led to a temporary structure that was
supposed to guide us to the elections within the next three months after the
term of the previous SRC expired. This term expired in the month of April 2020,
that is a year ago.
This interim SRC led by the
PYA (Progressive Youth Alliance), which consists of the following organisations,
SASCO (South African Students’ Congress), ANC Youth League, and the Young
Communist League of South Africa (aka YCL); has moved from crisis to crisis
with the first crisis being the delayed provision of e-learning data and
laptops. This crisis exposed the weaknesses of this collective, and not only
exposed their tactical weaknesses, but their strategical weaknesses. The second
crisis which confused and bamboozled them was the cohort system. In this system
we witnessed students missing out on permits, and due to that falling behind in
their academics. This required a strong push from opposition political heads
and manifested in a physical confrontation between two student leaders in Alice
who will not be named. The confrontation was more personal than political;
however, this was due to the other political head protecting the deployees from
the PYA. Once the permit system was finally sorted out, we went into another
crisis, which has been carried over to this year. This crisis was the late
payment of food allowances for NSFAS funded students, and the slow payment of
change for students funded by other bursary schemes.
We can see that this crisis
has spilt over into the new academic year where we see the slow and frustrating
loading of allowances. This is a result of an SRC led by leaders who are
content with the crumbs that management gives in the form of reforms and
concessions. The PYA-led SRC has demonstrated that it is not capable of taking
the issues of students forward, and the crisis comes to epic proportions in the
Student Services office of both campuses. The lack of spine, and revolutionary
will by both officers has led to us students believing that our voices will
never be heard. The height of this display of arrogance by our so-called
leaders is capped off by the fact that they communicate outcomes of meetings
when they feel like it. When an easy victory is won, we are bombarded with
statements that praise the PYA-led SRC, but when the victory is not won, we are
confronted by silence from them. It is a shame that we have reached this point
but let us be honest with ourselves, we would not be where we are if we acted
decisively and dealt with these so-called leaders.
The fact that we still have a lot of students
who are financially blocked says a lot and speaks about the poor administrative
abilities of the institution. The management has been getting away with murder
because we have an SRC that marches according to the dictates of the
management.
Way Forward
One may ask what is the way
forward to this mess we find ourselves in? The answer to this will be broken
down into the following key pressing demands:
i)
The immediate loading of allowances for all
NSFAS funded and other bursary funded students.
ii)
An immediate unblocking of all students who are
financially excluded due to the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic collapsed
many livelihoods.
iii)
An extension of the registration period to
accommodate students who have not been allowed to register due to the unjust
blocking system.
iv)
The scrapping of the blanket blocking system
due to how it always leads the institution to near administrative collapse (One
of these days the administrative arm will collapse!!!).
v)
The immediate rollout of data, and a blanket
system approach to be implemented.
vi)
The immediate release of lease forms for
non-res students.
vii)
The immediate opening of the appeal window to
allow NSFAS funded and NSFAS first time applicants to appeal their statuses.
viii)
The subsidization of the laptop loan-to-buy
system. It is unjust to charge us R6000 for a laptop that retails at R2900.
This in a nutshell is where we
should go. We are tired of fighting for the same issues over, and over again.
One of these days we will revolt, and when we do some will wish they were never
born.
This was written by anonymous comrades who would like to express their anger at the SRC.
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