SACP Eastern Cape Province calls for a moratorium on fee increases
22 October 2015
The South African Communist Party (SACP) in the Eastern Cape Province has noted the student protests against fee increases in the Rhodes University and other institutions of higher learning.
We support the legitimate demands by the students, majority of whom being children from poor and working class families who cannot afford sky-high university and college fees which push them out of the system and deny them access.
This financial exclusion is class discrimination. It is dangerous in the sense that is deepens elitist and class domination and inequality to the marginalisation of the overwhelming majority of the working class and the poor.
As the SACP in the Eastern Cape, we are therefore calling for a moratorium on fee increases. This should afford the task team that has been established by the government under the leadership of the Higher Education and Training Minister, Comrade Blade Nzimande and President Jacob Zuma time to look deeper into student funding. This should strengthen our movement`s ongoing programme to introduce free quality higher education, technical and vocational training for those who cannot afford and must pave the way towards a review of the government`s funding model to universities and colleges.
As the SACP, we condemn the use of excessive force by the police during student and other protests and unnecessary arrests. Conversely, the SACP is not blind to the good work done by those police who handle protests with great care. We congratulate and call on them to keep up the good work. In the same vein, the SACP is calling on all protestors to respect the rights of other people and their property as well as that of the public.
As the SACP, we refuse to be defocused by factionalists who seek to highjack a genuine cause for their narrow interests. These divisive and factional posturing by some individual political wannabes has nothing to do with the student and working class struggle for access to education but represent an agenda to achieve factional, corrupt and corporate capture of the movement by greedy elitist cartels.
The SACP condemns the unacceptable personalisation of the situation and the attacks that are directed at the Higher Education and Training Minister Comrade Blade Nzimande who is our Party`s General Secretary. The problems of student funding caused by the manner in which universities exercise their institutional autonomy and primarily caused by the historical economic conditions of persisting high levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty as well as by insufficient Treasury budget allocations to the Department of Higher Education and Training are not the creation of Comrade Blade as an individual leader of government and the ANC. It is populist to blame to attack and blame him individually and personally for the underlying issues that go far beyond the mandate of the single government department that he is leading as a Minister.
These attacks are nothing else but part of the rising anti-communist sentiments both inside and outside our movement in order to isolate comrade Nzimande and the working class leadership and components of the ANC-led alliance.
Issued by the SACP Eastern Cape.
Contact:
Siyabonga Mdodi - SACP Provincial Spokesperson
Mobile: +2783 358 8070
Office: +2740 635 1046/42
Fax: +2786 286 1281
Website: www.sacp.org.za
Facebook: SACP Eastern Cape
Xolile Nqatha - SACP Provincial Secretary
Mobile: +27823135005
Email: xolilenqatha@gmail.com
