South African students on Tuesday vowed to continue with current nationwide university shutdown protests until educational authorities wrote-off school debt and provided scholarships to needy students at the country’s varsities, APA has learnt.
Secretary-General of the University Law Students Association (ULSA), Shatadi Phoshoko, said: “We are definitely shutting down.”
He added: “We have been calling for this relief since last week. We are going to shut down the campus as our constituency (law students) demands that something must be done.”
“We are going to be part of the planned shutdown. As an association, we are not only representing our constituency of law students alone, but we are also representing all other students,” Phoshoko said.
The students have received the backing of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ Student Command at the University of Pretoria, who called for the postponement of the 2021 academic year.
The group’s spokesperson Pholoso Sehlelane said they were giving the university 24 hours to adhere to their demands to register new students and forgive historical debt among them.
“We are drafting a memorandum to this effect. Every student here is making an input on what must happen. We will hand the memorandum over to the Vice-Chancellor for his action,” he said.
Several universities and colleges across the country held no lectures on Monday and at least one institution, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has suspended lectures for the rest of the week.
On Monday afternoon, a female student was admitted to a hospital after the police allegedly shot and wounded her in the leg during protests at University of Johannesburg.
Several students were arrested during the Monday demonstrations which were triggered off last week at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where a passer-by was killed in a crossfire when the police shot at protesting students in efforts to disperse them.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said his government would make efforts to meet the students’ demands because education was a national investment.
NM/as/APA