TUT students not taking part in national shutdown
"Most of the other universities are done with their academic year. If we don’t finish it before 31 March, our students will face mountains of problems compared to the others."
Despite supporting the call for free education, TUT’s student representative council (SRC) said it would not take part in the national shut down because of its commitment to finishing the 2020 academic year.
“Most of the other universities are done with their academic year,” said the SRC secretary at TUT Soshanguve campus Zwelakhe Dlamini.
“And if we don’t finish with the academic year before 31 March, students will face mountains of problems compared to the others. Already NFSAS has problems with money; so if we do not finish on time, no one will give students allowances after March.
“Students are busy writing their semester tests. We could not finish it last year because most of the students here are from very deprived socio-economic backgrounds, so you find that the students do not have the necessary gadgets. Sometimes they are affected by load shedding and network issues. So we thought, let us finish the 2020 academic year then when we are done, we will tackle registration issues.”
Dlamini said they were in solidarity with other universities countrywide.
He said students supported calls by Wits students for the road where Mthokozisi Ntumba was allegedly killed by police during the shutdown last week, to be named after him.
“It’s high time that we make a call to the police because when students are striking, it is not always violent. Usually, when the police come, that is when the violence starts.”
SRC president Mike Mothiba condemned the “ongoing police violence”.
He called on police minister Bheki Cele and president Cyril Ramaphosa “to ban the use of rubber bullets on innocent young people whose only crime was to dare to dream”.
“The student debt keeps increasing yearly, and more students are denied access to universities while many others have completed their studies with nothing to show as universities have kept their qualification,” Mothiba said.
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