JONATHAN JANSEN: How a small band of disrupters hold education hostage
'You can give every student free higher education tomorrow, and the disrupters would find another item of discontent and continue the chaos'
The event was months in the making. Organisers travelled to the nine provinces and met with the full range of student organisations to hammer out agreements for content and participation at a Higher Education National Convention of stakeholders. For two days last week at the Eskom Centre in Midrand, students, parents, staff, vice-chancellors, government officials, corporate leaders and civil society activists met to seek solutions to the standoff in universities around several issues, but principally student fees.There was some nostalgia, no doubt, on the part of the organisers and older activists from the struggle including Dikgang Moseneke, the once fiery leader of the one-settler-one-bullet Pan Africanist Congress who would become the voice of moderation as deputy chief justice of the Constitutional Court. This group of elders and eminent people came within one word of calling themselves the National Education Crisis Committee, a once powerful alliance of progressive students, wo...
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