SACP Gauteng calls for immediate moratorium on fee increments pending outcome of a negotiated settlement and broad consultations
22 October 2015
The SACP Gauteng calls on government to consider an across the board moratorium on fee increments. This is in order to allow for a process of broader consultations with key stakeholders and student organizations. The moratorium will create a favorable and progressive climate for negotiations and consensus seeking process.
This step is an imperative, considering the fact that there is a clear and well orchestrated mobilization to engineer a counter-revolution, project government in a bad light, locally and internationally, and to isolate, scapegoat and target SACP General Secretary and Minister of Higher Education, Dr Blade Nzimande. The attempt to besiege parliament yesterday is a deeply worrying alien phenomena. It corresponds only to the frenzied wishes of elements that are irreconcilably hostile to the SACP, its General Secretary Cde Nzimande and the working class struggle for socialism.
A moratorium will isolate a neo-fascists and right wing agenda of those seeking to hijack legitimate student struggles for factional battles in the broad democratic movement and weaken the Alliance.
As part of the broad and democratic consultation process, consideration should be given to the review of the entire student funding model. There is a growing illusion of achieving free higher education under the framework of the capitalist system. It is increasingly declassing the issue by denying the inseparable connection of education cost to the class structure of capitalist South African society. It is in our view that the intermediate period demands a progressively class differentiated funding model. Under capitalist conditions, a blanket free education funding model which doesn`t not correspond to the economic structure will further deepen class divisions in favour of the rich and invariably limit educational access for children from working class families.
A blanket free education model will exonerate the bourgeoisie and ruling classes that accumulated massive wealth during apartheid capitalism and BEE tenderepreneurs. This will further deepen the class divide.
The SACP Gauteng calls on all revolutionary student organizations to isolate right wing elements by supporting a broad democratic consensus. It will bring us closer to a resolution of current contradictions unilaterally imposed by unaccountable university managements and councils in the guise of bourgeois institutional autonomy.
We also call on revolutionary student organizations to review tactics and strategies. Permanent revolution tactics, however popular they may be at a given time, have never won the day in any serious revolutionary process in the whole world. On the contrary, more often such tactics lead to confusion and demoralization without any serious gains for the students.
It is important that revolutionary student organizations renew tactics to sustain a moral high ground and not loose the strategic initiative to fascists and counterrevolutionary forces hell bent on hijacking their legitimate struggles for cheap and narrow political ends. The correct path is only by subordinating the demand for free education to the working class struggle against the capitalist system and imperialism, in favour of an advance towards socialism, the only system capable of guaranteeing all the basic material, cultural, educational needs of young people of our country.
Issued by the SACP Gauteng province
Contact:
Jacob Mamabolo - SACP Gauteng Provincial Secretary
Mobile: 082 884 1868
Lucian Segami - SACP Gauteng Provincial Spokesperson
Mobile: +2779 5220 098
Office: +2711 339 3621/2
Twitter: GPSACP
Facebook Page: SACP Gauteng Province
