Students from Johannesburg and Wits universities arrive at the African National Congress ruling party (ANC) headquarters, on October 22, 2015, in Johannesburg, to protest against university fee hikes, in rolling protests that have become a focus for youth frustration in South Africa.
South Africa has a new band of heroes: a multiracial, idealistic, fearless group of university students, some of them the children of anti-apartheid liberation leaders, who braved the stun grenades and truncheons of the riot police this week to take their protests to the front doors of Parliament.
In the space of just a few days, the student protests have expanded from one Johannesburg university to become a powerful national movement, shutting down campuses across the country, marching on political offices, rattling the government and forcing the ruling party to scramble to catch up.
There are signs, in fact, that the student uprising has the potential to become the beginnings of a long-awaited "African Spring" in this country, galvanizing broad support from the widespread anger over unemployment and inequality. It's already the biggest wave of student protests since apartheid ended in 1994, and the first to breach the gates of the parliamentary precinct.
The ruling African National Congress, after watching silently for several days and promising only a slight reduction in tuition increases, is now rushing to co-opt the student movement. The ANC is sending its party members to join the next planned march on Friday, while blaming university officials for the tuition increases that sparked the first demonstrations.
The movement began as a protest against a 10.5 per cent tuition increase at the biggest university in Johannesburg last week. But as it rapidly became a national movement, the power of the students soon overwhelmed the authorities. In Cape Town, thousands of protesters left their campuses on Wednesday, taking the police by surprise and bursting through the gates of the parliamentary precinct, where units of riot police hurled stun grenades to beat them back.
Then, on Thursday, thousands of students marched on the ANC's headquarters at Luthuli House in downtown Johannesburg, obliging the ANC to pledge its support. And on Friday, they plan to march on the seat of government itself: the Union Buildings in Pretoria, where President Jacob Zuma will be required to address them.
In total, tens of thousands of students have joined demonstrations and sit-ins at more than a dozen campuses across the country. Universities and colleges have cancelled classes and exams, while promising to roll back tuition increases.
As the marches grew, the police responded with rubber bullets, batons, pepper spray and stun grenades, arresting close to 100 of the students and even threatening to charge them with "treason" for breaching the parliamentary precinct – a charge that was quickly abandoned.
While the heavy cost of higher education is a major issue in South Africa, the student grievances go far beyond that. During the apartheid era in South Africa, students were always the vanguard of broader political movements. The 1976 student uprising in Soweto township was a pivotal event in the anti-apartheid movement, igniting years of protests that eventually forced the white-minority regime to negotiate with the ANC (whose leader, Nelson Mandela, was himself an activist in the ANC's youth league in its early days).
It's clear that today's student protesters have strong national support in a country where young people are frustrated by persistently high unemployment, growing inequality, economic stagnation, political corruption and the slow pace of black empowerment. While the ANC continues to win elections, its support has been eroding, year by year, and South Africa has become a tinderbox of political anger.
Previous protest movements in post-apartheid South Africa were limited to specific towns or industries, often led by unions or striking workers. None has expanded as dramatically and successfully as the student protests in recent days. The students have shown a skill at rapid national mobilization that has rarely been seen since the fall of apartheid.
"Our students have taught us an important lesson in this past week through the unprecedented uprisings that we have seen not only on our campus but throughout our country," said Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, the Johannesburg campus where the protests began last week.
"They have had more success in the last week than many of our collective efforts since the dawn of our democracy," Mr. Habib said in a statement on Thursday.
"The single biggest challenge in our society is inequality. It can only truly be addressed if those in need have access to an affordable world-class education. Our students have done more to achieve this in the last seven days than we have ever managed to achieve before."
But while the students will succeed in extracting more financial support from the ANC government, South Africa needs more than just a struggle over the distribution of its limited resources. Its economy is stagnating so badly that many of its students have little chance at jobs when they graduate. The economy is growing at a slower rate than the labour force, leaving young people in a fierce competition for jobs. The unemployment rate – more than 50 per cent for young people – has scarcely budged for years.
Even as the students were bursting through the gates of the parliamentary precinct and battling with riot police on Wednesday, the government was revising its economic forecast downward again. It now expects the economy to grow by just 1.5 per cent this year and 1.7 per cent next year. Unless the ANC adopts better policies to encourage economic growth, there is little hope of a better life even for the students who can afford the high cost of education.
Geoffrey York