Failed or repeating students cannot be prioritised over new students

In December 2017, on the day the 54th elective conference of the ANC began, then president Jacob Zuma declared that higher education would be free for students from poor families. This was huge, or it was supposed to be.

This was a culmination of decades of struggle. It was the day one of the cornerstones of the Freedom Charter was brought to life: “Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit.”

And the desperate outgoing president of the ANC used it to bolster support for the Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma slate at the conference. There had been no infrastructural support prepared for the administration of this free higher education, none whatsoever.

WATCH: Wits student protest intensifies

More than five years later, the country is rocked by unnecessary and violent protests at institutions like Wits University, soon to be joined by the Tshwane University of Technology and the University of Johannesburg.

Is this to say Zuma is to blame for this unnecessary mess? No, not by a long shot. His party though, the ANC under Cyril Ramaphosa, has had longer than enough to sort out the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (Nsfas) and the rules that govern it so that by now, no student registering for higher learning should sleep in a library or march to a vice-chancellor’s house.

The #FeesMustFall movement that brought the government to the point of desperately saying “here’s your free education then!” should have been the last significant student movement to disrupt classes for free education.

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Universities and other places of higher learning will never be devoid of one form of protest or another, because higher learning is itself the door to enlightening society to what could be wrong with it, what can be done to change it and how.

But what is happening in higher education now is a replay of student protests that happened over three decades ago at the height of segregated education under apartheid, without the slightest thought to the damage being done.

The damage to society isn’t only in terms of infrastructural and property damage, but also to the entrenchment of the entitlement mentality that says “even students who failed courses government paid for must be allowed to register for free again”.

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That is the sort of entitlement that has made students feel it is appropriate to march to the residence of the administrative head of a university because they feel he is blocking their access to “free education”.

But even the Freedom Charter was specific enough to say “higher education financing shall be awarded on the basis of merit”.

Failed or repeating students cannot be prioritised over new students.

Government has not covered itself in glory when it comes to the administration of free education through Nsfas. It has left many universities in the lurch and having to defend themselves against violent and entitled students who actually think education is free. No, it is not.

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Society pays for that free education and those fortunate enough to be beneficiaries must utilise that opportunity wisely. Freedom was not free, neither is education. Hector Pieterson and his generation paid the price. It is time to learn.