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Silambile and Sifuna Ukufunda!!!

 

                            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.

 

 EDITOR'S NOTE

This was written by anonymous comrades who would like to express their anger at the SRC.

 

 

 

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