Protest action at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has been ongoing since the beginning of the 2023 academic year, although the matters being protested are not new to its students, and university administration.
For years now, UCT’s Student Representative Council (SRC) has launched into action against UCT’s fee block rule, a struggle that has been passed down from generation after generation of student representatives. The fee block prohibits students from registering for courses and accommodation until their owing fee amount falls below the R1 000 threshold.
However, despite UCT having once again lifted the fee block to a R10 000 threshold (as was done during the 2022 academic year), the SRC demands that the fee block be lifted entirely, a demand which has thus far been denied.
In response to UCT’s rejection of their demands, the SRC released a statement to the UCT student body sharing the following:
Council and UCT Executive proved that they are willing to let the futures of 7435 students with fee blocks come to an end, however the SRC refuses this fate.
As a result, the SRC has continued to launch numerous mass meetings and protests in hopes that UCT will eventually have fee blocks lifted. However, although students are no longer being blocked from entering campus by protestors, there have been claims of interruptions of classes by a handful of protestors, over which the university has expressed grave concern.
Consequently, a recent statement by the UCT Executive body shared involvement of law enforcement to combat these issues.
The statement shared the following:
These acts of disruptions are unlawful in terms of the interim interdict granted by the Western Cape High Court on Friday, 17 February 2023. As a result, the relevant members of the executive have alerted the SAPS, who will intervene and respond to these disruptions.
The SRC has subsequently responded in disappointment to the involvement of police action in student affairs for what they claim is “the first time in 6 years”. They shared their disappointment in the following statement released to the UCT student body on Wednesday, 8 March:
This is in direct contradiction of the transformative stance of the former VC, Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, to never criminalise students trying to express themselves…
This police involvement has now escalated, with the SRC claiming that students who launched a protest on UCT’s middle campus on Friday morning were met with brute force by the Western Cape South African Police Services (SAPS).
In their statement, they shared that:
[Stun] grenades without warning were released on students, police trampled over students and went on to knock unconscious one student before arresting that student and another one.
The SRC also alleges that students of colour were being targeted by the police during this conflict. These events are still ongoing, though the SRC has now begun to refer to the current situation as “a state of emergency”.
As far as the SRC is concerned, there will be no end to their efforts until their demands are met. Of their demands, at the forefront are two points:
- That there be no more student evictions from the temporary housing that they were provided in the midst of the accommodation crisis.
- That academic activity is halted until all fee blocks are lifted.
The SRC confirmed in a statement released on the morning of Friday, the 10th of March, that the evictions have stopped, but that fee blocks have still been upheld.
Furthermore, whilst the SRC seem to be advocating for an excluded 7 435 members of the UCT student body, UCT has released recent data that alleges otherwise. The data reveals the following claims:
- There are a total of 1 059 academically eligible students with fee blocks who are yet to register, an issue which the university aims to address.
- There are approximately 4 100 students overall who have managed to register for the 2023 academic year due to “various measures put in place to address fee debt”.
- There are approximately 3 400 students with outstanding fees who have registered for the academic year after the fee block threshold was lifted.
As it currently stands, the SRC has staged another campus meeting, urging students to join them, whilst response on the matter from the UCT Executive body has yet come.
