The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
With an inescapable truth that elections will happen next year, political parties are taking turns to court the young vote and the student vote.
In one of my publications elsewhere I have argued that student politics is imported into mainstream politics and that culture of campus behaviour is brought along. For this series, I want to engage the students, particularly those who are enthusiastic about student politics and activism. Zimbabwe, like any other African country has been a subject of shifting ontologies in students’ paradigms and this calls for a review of the state of our politics in campuses.
This week we shall have a look at a historical outlook of how some, like us have been and still are, as we traverse together we shall interrogate our state of the students’ bodies which are sprouting and in some instances arguably failing one of the most important people in our land. What happens when you assemble among the most talented of your society within universities?
Is South Africa a good case study?
One answer to this question is provided by the case of the newly created black universities in the 1960s. Given the repression of the period following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when the key liberation movements were also outlawed, it was difficult to see how any serious political challenge to white minority domination could be mounted and from where it could come. Yet, as is well known as Steve Biko in “I write what I like”, the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), formed in 1968, was able to escape immediate repression, establish itself, and develop a mass following at the black universities. The black racial and ethnic higher educational institutions were not designed to produce rebels. They had been charged with the responsibility of winning students intellectually and politically to the separate development programme of apartheid, and generating the administrative corps for the separate development bureaucracies. That, after all, was the purpose of the strict ideological control of the black institutions, their domination by Afrikaner nationalists, and the repressive controls on students.
While university leaders and government first saw Saso as an ethnic organisation that vindicated its policies, Saso members challenged student leaders at English Universities to protest against the social colour bar, argued that blacks in liberal student organisations at English universities should form their own organisations, drew attention to the limited role blacks played in their own universities, emphasised black dignity and pride and from 1970 onwards became involved in protest actions at several black universities. These actions included support for black people establishing a broad range of youth, women, community, and medical civil society organisations to build black solidarity. Their protests were always aimed at enriching the whole Black humanity and not individuals.
Leaflets from Burundi
Little is marvelled of on Burundi yet its history on student politics and activism is rich. Like in Zimbabwe, the history of its emergence sought to counter social imbalances as a voice by the intellectually astute. Because African societies back then wriggled with the most complex yet common struggle, racial disharmony, students’ bodies across the Global South sought to disentangle that oppressive meticulously crafted system, and this, they did successfully. The creation of the University of Burundi, which celebrated its 53rd anniversary this year, is linked to the decolonisation movement of the 1960s. The almost simultaneous formation of the first Burundian student organisation, the Union Nationale des Etudiants Barundi (Uneba), likewise played a major historical role in the struggle for national freedom. I reckon, Richard Mahomva has on several occasions argued that African students in general contributed significantly to the decolonisation movement throughout the African continent.
Burundi teaches us that the consistent creation of serial student organisations fosters a form of interdependence given each party’s interests. Even without being legally registered by an authority, the University of Burundi acknowledges the various associations. At the time of their creation, none of the student organisations intended to have a formal role in the decision-making processes of the university or in the overall governance of higher education in the country for that matter. Their objective was to serve their constituency by channelling and rationalising the aspirations of students in order to avoid erratic or violent action both in society and in politics.
At its inception in 1960, Uneba’s objective was to address the political issues of the time, including the question of immediate independence of Burundi from Belgium. Nationalism was the weapon of the independence struggle and students desired to embody the hope of an entire nation. These students did not seek to exercise power directly but to contribute their ideas for consideration by decision-makers at any level.
During the 1960s, the Uneba interventions did not focus on the issues of student life at the university but rather on the political agenda of their country. Convinced from the beginning of the importance of their participation in national liberation, the acts of the 6th congress of Uneba in 1965, proclaimed that : It is not possible for a student from developing countries to deal only with books and theoretical knowledge that they gather during the school period and neglect, while he is still studying, the application of theoretical knowledge to national realities. The activities of Uneba were indeed intended to build on theories in order to examine and take a position on national realities.
In 1960, Uneba sent a rather provocative petition to the General Assembly of the United Nations entitled “For Burundi: Independence or Nothing”. The petition received a supportive response from the United Nations as well as the Burundian political party, Union pour le Progrès national (Uprona), that had requested independence. The action created a relationship between the new nationalist leaders of the Uprona party and students.
Did Nkrumah leave a good Campus ethos?
The discourse on Ghana’s democratisation has proceeded without much focused regard to the indefatigable role that the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) has played. In the struggle for independence, the fight against authoritarian and military rule and the support for democracy, the NUGS has been at the centre of political action and it has championed the interests of the marginalised including persuading the university authorities to implement a quota admission system for female students, rendering support to regimes that promoted student interests, and conversely antagonising those that betrayed the fiduciary trust reposed in them by the people of Ghana.
History records that in the 1970s and 1980s, the NUGS was widely identified as a youth organisation with an anti-government agenda. This is because it served as the principal non-political youth association devoted to fighting injustices and state saboteurs. The demise of authoritarian military rule in Ghana and the emergence of democratic rule in the 1990s, the NUGS’ role as vanguard of freedom and justice has waned. While NUGS’ role as opposition to military rule has been rendered redundant, there is a new phenomenon of NUGS engagement with politics that involves striking acquaintance with politicians in the new constitutional order.
A colleague of mine in Ghana shared with me that the current relationship between the NUGS and politicians, manifests in four dimensions: First, politicians have tried to court NUGS’ support with financial inducements and rewards in the form of scholarships to study abroad and assurance of positions in government. Second, politicians have orchestrated a break-up of the constituent groups that make up the NUGS. For instance, some politicians have instigated the Ghana National Union of Polytechnic Students (GNUPS) to secede from NUGS, thereby contributing to the looming danger of NUGS’ disintegration. Third, it is commonplace that the politicians have infiltrated the processes for choosing the leaders of NUGS.
She says, they have not only sponsored their preferred candidates to contest NUGS’ elections but also weakened their united front in order to subjugate them to political control. Fourth, the politicians have antagonised student leaders who have failed to support their policies and had mobilised opposition or demonstration against them. In the same vein, educational authorities, particularly the university authorities have moved to protect their interests by ensuring that student elections produce leaders who are cooperative rather than agents of politicians to undermine corporate university governance.
Indeed, beginning from the mid-2000s, the various universities in Ghana have sought to curtail the influence of students by introducing stringent academic requirements as a means of determining who emerges as a student leader. In the University of Ghana for example, to hold any position in the Student Representative Council (SRC), one needs to be a student with a Second Class Upper and a grade point average of 3.0 and above. Without this, one cannot contest any position. With the introduction of this policy, only timid and timorous souls who are not prepared to challenge the status quo and act assertively in defense of student interest have emerged. This partly explains why the days of demonstrations seem over on the various tertiary educational campuses in Ghana.
To be continued…
