The Sunday News
Micheal Mhlanga
IN the 20th century, African students occupied in many respects a privileged position in national politics.
Given their elite status in society and credentials as spokespersons of the masses, African students’ extra-parliamentary oppositional politics enjoyed for the greatest part being a legitimate part of the political order.
The lack of autonomy and dependence on government of most universities meant that the state of higher education was largely a mirror of the political and economic state of African nations; hence, students’ political attention was acutely concentrated on national politics rather than on higher education and this has crippled the welfare of students in today’s institutions.
The past week allowed us to reflect on the historical perspectives of students’ movement in Africa with reference to South Africa, Burundi and Ghana.
Through that analysis, we were able to contemplate on the state of student activism and politics in Zimbabwe whose actions have adopted a rather “regurgitate” approach as a representative than a proactive and innovative institution.
Through this article, I shall draw your attention to the “capture” of the student body in Zimbabwe with particular attention to the turn of the millennium which has had so much influence on modern politics.
I centre my argument on the arrest of independent thinking, the shift from intellectual rationale to desperate politics and I shall also hint on the attempt to redeem the student movement as a fore-reflective of emancipating the academic body which has a political muscle of swaying the vote should it be handled carefully.
From plurality to fragments of the student struggle
The period of African student politics proposed by Luescher-Mamashela and Mugume (2014) starts in the post-independence period (1960-1985) where across the continent students were preoccupied with matters of national self-rule and democracy and, in the case of South Africa, opposition to apartheid.
Following the work of Federici, Caffentzis, and Alidou (2000), they argue that the period was dominated by students seeking “to prevent the new African governments from capitulating to foreign interests”.
At the same time, demands for the Africanisation of staff and curricula and increasingly calls for a formal representation of students in the administration of their universities predominated students’ political agenda in the educational sphere.
Zimbabwe’s students’ body cannot be ignored in this periodical debate with special reference to how the student body became an expression of demanding public accountability, transparency and effective governance.
The monumental “One Party State Debate” in 1988-89 was commendably affianced by students who retained an academic approach to politics and governance as evidenced by their contribution to academic political discourses.
These were the times of the now Professor Arthur Guseni Mutambara and the ever brilliant Chief Fortune Charumbira.
Following the near collapse of many African economies starting in the late 1970s into the 1980s, country after country was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for financial assistance.
Such assistance was then tied to conditionalities of economic and political liberalisation, including the imposition of structural adjustment to which Zimbabwe succumbed to an unfortunate mixture of ESAP and an infamously painstaking drought of 1992.
SAPs introduced a number of new features to African higher education including an end to free higher education and the introduction of cost-sharing policies, the introduction of tuition fees and various other kinds of levies, the reduction or withdrawal of education subsidies, along with the privatisation of various services including student accommodation, catering, and support services.
To Zimbabwe, it was in 1996 when the students’ loans and grants debate began to adopt a new form, with the subsidy being substituted, to some who reminisce on that period, they say that is the “death of mari yekugona”.
Memory serves to narrate that the government paid you for being academically excellent because university back then was a reserve for the brilliant and they were few, (although the mari yekugona part is just a joking explanation).
The impact of years of economic downturn and SAP-imposed underfunding of higher education was further exacerbated by the pressure to expand enrolments, given the successes of post-independence health and education policies across the continent which meant that student enrolments in higher education grew rapidly.
The early 90s in Zimbabwe realised that fundamental macro-political and macro-economic issues preoccupied student activists who were sparked into action by their own experience of basic “bread and butter issues”, articulating their grievances more or less consistently in terms of principled concerns such as the right to education, social justice, democracy and self-determination.
The advent of a new political movement in 2000 then ushered a new political and activism culture.
In that year, student movements found themselves in the cauldron of a political pilgrimage.
Their political bargain was hinged on numbers they controlled in campuses which were all eligible to vote, politically conscious, had a social capital to the young people who associated a degree with “right” thinking and would be easily persuaded by a university graduate.
At that time the University of Zimbabwe was still the hub of student activism with a few from the Harare Polytechnic Media College where one would find the likes of Nelson Chamisa when he was still eloquent.
It is at that point when the student movement retired from being an institution of checks and balances to the establishment and became a political party wing within the then MDC.
One can attribute it to the social influence the likes of Professor Welshman Ncube had on the students because of his lectureship stint at the university and the relationship the students leaders had with the Executive Directors of Civic Organisations who financed the opposition then who were the alumni of the students’ organisation. The students were “captured”.
The capture of Zinasu
After Zimbabwe National Students Union (Zinasu) ceremonially became a wing of the MDC through the facilitation of the likes of Chamisa, the late Learnmore Jongwe, Tafadzwa Musekiwa to mention but a few, it meant that MDC’s main wing dictated how the body operates and engages the establishment.
This culminated in a clash of institutional ideologies. At this period clashes between institutions and the organ heightened.
There was a radical transformation of UBAism from a concept of identifying the intelligent hardcore males (mostly who came from rural areas-origins of UBA and USA) in the university to militants in institutions of learning.
This was also the case in the streets where a myriad of demonstrations by the opposition body politics characterised the daily Zimbabwe. Since then, students’ movements are a resemblance of political party behaviour.
A lot of students who were not interested in national politics were affected on campus because a series of strikes as a democratic exercise ceased to be on academic issues on campus but sponsored actions to exert pressure on the regime.
2003 then saw a breakaway from Zinasu forming what is known as Zimbabwe Congress of Students’ Union (Zicosu). The Zimbabwean student movement has undergone many changes and its main national associations, Zinasu and the Zimbabwe Congress of Students’ Union (Zicosu), both operate in a partisan movement fashion.
The emergence of Zicosu as a counter narrative to a highly polarised opposition Zinasu has been argued not to have been an answer to the continuous misfortunes of students in campuses.
With both movements being affiliates of political parties, they have been susceptible to inter and intra party conflicts and factions which has further fragmented the outlook of student’s bodies in Zimbabwe.
Together, they have been rivals of national politics differences and factional clashes instead of academic institutions.
This is one of the reasons why students will be very keen to abscond Students Representative Committees (SRC) elections because they detest what the institutions represent. Both organisations are perceived as sirens of who finances the campaign and a clear alter server of any factional leader.
They have imported despicable political party trends into campuses such that their terms are manifest with personal political clashes and them being used as pawns to fight in-house politics.
Evidence can be drawn from one university whose buses and buildings were re-decorated with factional graffiti used as an electoral de-legitimising tool. Such is the state of how the student body has been captured and affected voter behaviour on campus.
The coming week we shall look at how Zinasu divorced itself from MDC-T this year and created another faction and how the actions of the students’ bodies contribute to voter apathy, a behaviour imported even into mainstream politics.
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