TAKING IT TO THE STREETS: Protesting Wits students leave the Johannesburg campus yesterday before blocking traffic on Empire Road. The university will be closed again today. The fee protest has been taken up at other universities.
Image by: ALON SKUY
University fee hike: Gates of protests open in South Africa
Violent protests that have shut universities across South Africa are minor compared to what the country might soon face.
"What we are seeing here now is a children's picnic compared to what is coming," said political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi.
"Unless we deal with economic transformation we are headed for levels of conflict we are yet to imagine."
He issued his warning after Wits University students - protesting against a proposed 10.5% fee hike - spilled into the streets, blocking traffic on Empire Road.
A motorist who forced his way through the crowd, narrowly missing a number of students, was attacked and beaten and his vehicle overturned.
At the University of Cape Town, two people were hurt in similar demonstrations when a man tried to charge past students blockading several buildings.
At the same time, management at UCT was granted an urgent court interdict preventing protesting students and their leaders from interfering with the university's operations.
Near Rhodes University, police fired stun grenades at protesting students trying to force their way through a gate.
Students at Stellenbosch University occupied its administration building. Despite warnings that violence would increase as students' anger grew, Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande said the fee increases were not a crisis, just a challenge. He will meet university stakeholders today to discuss the fee hikes.
At a press briefing, he attempted to downplay the government's role in the funding of tertiary education, saying the responsibility did not lie "solely" with the department but with the institutions.
Students' representative councils across the country have refused to back down on their rejection of the fee increases.
Wits SRC president Shaeera Kalla said students were not willing to compromise and continued to demand a 0% increase.
"The university has acted in bad faith and we will continue to protest against the fee increments. This has become a national issue. It is of national importance."
She said with the start of exams just over a fortnight away the students' momentum was not going to be broken.
"The fight is beyond individuals. This is bigger than anyone's exams and degrees. This is about changing history," Kalla said.
Former SRC president Mcebo Dlamini said: "We want to frustrate the city and will shut it down. We want to let [the government and the university] know that this is a national crisis. The ANC government needs to come to us ."
A spokesman for the Stellenbosch University SRC, James de Villiers, said: "We are not leaving until the fees fall.
Matshiqi said the protests showed how wrong the characterisation of "born-frees" was.
"There has been this idea that born-frees would be informed by a logic different from [that of] their parents and previous generations simply because they were not there during apartheid. What people have forgotten is that the socio-economic disadvantages of apartheid are not in the past but still very much in the present."
He said the demonstrations were partly informed by the fact that the "kingdom of heaven" promised after the 1994 democratic breakthrough had not materialised sufficiently in students' eyes.
". there is a disjunction between their material conditions and what our democracy promises."
The protests, said Matshiqi, were part of the far larger issue of lack of transformation, particularly in economic conditions.
"The economy is most probably going to be the main source of conflict, and the ANC government and all South Africans need to be prepared to unite behind the transformation effort."
Political-social commentator Ibrahim Fakir said the protests were symptomatic of a number of issues . inequality, access to the economy, welfare, education, health and unemployment.