The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) wishes the South African Students’ Congress (SASCO) a happy 29th anniversary. This anniversary represents three decades of a laudable history of activism and the struggle against injustices.
We congratulate SASCO for not only championing the student struggles but also in managing to link them to those of the workers on the shop floor and poor in communities.
This organisation continues to be at the heart of the struggle for justice and equality as shown by their role during the #FeesMustFall campaign. While waging this important campaign about the access and the funding of higher education; SASCO also proved to be reliable allies of workers by also championing the insourcing of outsourced services, therefore, pushing the federation’s campaign for the creation of decent work in higher education institutions.
While some progress has been made in opening the doors of learning, there is still a lot of work to be done. The opening of the doors of learning is by and large still dictated by the social and economic circumstances of a typical South African household. Students and workers need to continue to work together to tackle these challenges.
The country’s education system generally reproduces inequalities based on class and race. Different management dynamics exist from one province to another, and the quality of standards in the culture of learning and teaching is decreasing.
Whilst the Freedom Charter and the Constitution enjoin the progressive realisation of socioeconomic rights which emphasises the universality and decommodification of education, the current trajectory of change in higher education departs from this framework of universality and decommodification. Tertiary education, in particular higher education is playing a crucial role in the reproduction of the dominant ideological outlook in society that seeks to maintain the status quo.
The lack of transformation in higher education has resulted from policy choices that have been made in the restructuring and the mode of governance of the institutions- principally the corporatisation of the institutions.
Corporatisation of institutions of higher learning, with all the highly pressurised competition for resources, prestige and influence, rather than engendering differentiation and diversity in the system, undermines the key objective of a diversified system that would improve access for students with different educational backgrounds and achievements.
Academic freedom and institutional autonomy are necessary freedoms that enable our universities to effectively address the imperatives and developmental challenges of our society while the exercise of this autonomy on the part of the institutions must be accompanied by accountability especially in relation to the use of public resources visà-vis national priorities that include the transformation of our universities so that they become more equitable, inclusive and just.
Higher education should be guided by the broadly progressive and participatory policy formulation process that is composed of key principles of equity, democracy, effectiveness, and development. In historically white institutions, racism remains rife and the education Alliance needs to cooperate to embark on thorough-going programmes to deal with it.
The private sector through its resources is able to influence and even impinge on the institutional autonomy. The largely racial and gendered inequities that continue to exist in education and research institutions are unsustainable. Most of the intellectual property that is generated in South Africa is contributed by white scientists, innovators and researchers who were beneficiaries of apartheid privileged education.
The task of COSATU in alliance with Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) and other progressive formations in the sector is to deepen the transformation of these institutions in favour of the working class, especially with regard to access, governance and the orientation of the curriculum design. The area of skills development is key to the emancipation of the working class from economic bondage.
Building the developmental state will significantly depend on the extent to which the higher education system responds not only to the current shortage of skills in the broader economy but also the imperative to forge a competent public service cadreship. This must mean a clinical rupture with all the key policies formulated within the neoliberal paradigm, including their manifestation in higher education.
The other challenge is that in today’s high-tech and globalised world, the economy is derived more from ideas than from the production of tangible assets; therefore, the new challenge for the higher education sector is to generate useful ideas.
The 4IR question should be uppermost in the minds and deliberations of young people under the leadership of SASCO. We all need to ensure that these technologies work for the benefit of humanity.
In the context of the 2020 global economic and health crisis, the social, economic and management sciences of Higher Education Institutions have to undergo curriculum reform in order to liberate themselves from the enslavement by a single idea that the market is the answer to all of our societal and developmental problems.
SASCO has a huge role to play to ensure that this is achieved. We expect it to work to ensure that universities are mass-based centres of people’s power and not institutions divorced from people’s experiences in communities.
We must also ensure that SASCO takes the lead in ensuring young people of this country are empowered through relevant ideological training and grounded in accurate revolutionary theory.
The Federation calls on SASCO to wage unrelenting campaigns to defend young women and fight gender-based violence. This is a battle that we all have to win, and young people have a much bigger role to play.
In celebrating this historic milestone, SASCO must recommit itself to taking on the fight for economic emancipation of the poor majority that finds itself at the bottom end of the economic pyramid. We also expect SASCO to continue to be an intellectual reservoir of the progressive trade union movement in this country.
Without a vibrant, radical, and intellectually curious SASCO, there is no COSATU and the Alliance is dead. SASCO represent the custodians of this country’s future and we expect it to be hands-on in shaping the direction of this country. We need to see it join forces with the working class in the struggle to defeat capitalism that has seen millions of South Africans living lives of brute survival.
As a federation, we are committed to working with SASCO through our Young Workers Forum and affiliated unions to decisively advance our campaign for the scrapping of historical debt of particularly young workers, hat has relegated a majority of them into a permanent debt trap.
Happy 29th birthday SASCO!
Issued by COSATU