1. The trouble

No matter which direction you’re facing, the view from the eleventh floor of the Senate House building on the East Campus of the University of Witwatersrand is a view of privilege. If you’re facing south, looking out over the railroad yards and the Central Business District, it’s probable that a) you’re resting your privileged bones in a wingback armchair in the lounge, or b) you’re delighting your privileged palate with a gourmet meal in the dining room. If you’re facing north, looking out over the jacarandas and oaks of Johannesburg’s upper income suburbs, it’s probable that a) you’re sitting in the executive office of one of the privileged members of the vice-chancellor’s management team, or b) you are one of the privileged members of the vice-chancellor’s management team.

Back in the winter of 1993, soon after Chris Hani had been murdered and students at South Africa’s major universities were reflecting, via daily protests, what looked to be the beginning of the end of the “peaceful” transition, files and office stationery were flung from the windows of this selfsame eleventh floor. Conceptually, the issues of 1993 weren’t all that different from the issues of 2015 – frustration at the slow pace of change, as magnified a hundred-fold by the perceived lack of political will of the country’s entrenched elite. If you didn’t know better, you might in fact say that the books on display in the cabinet in the lounge were the only sign that things had moved on: Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, Susan Booysen’s The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power, and Adam Habib’s South Africa’s Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects.

Three books written by three of the political arena’s more formidable public intellectuals, and all of them an extended meditation, in one form or another, on the challenges faced by liberation movements once they became the government of the day. The books begged an obvious question, which happened to be a riff on one of the questions I had come up here to ask.

How could Wits University not bridge the chasm between privilege and poverty as expressed in the 2015 #FeesMustFall protests, especially given that a thinker like Mbembe was on permanent staff at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, a thinker like Booysen was a professor in the Wits School of Governance, and a thinker like Habib was the aforesaid vice-chancellor himself? From the eleventh floor, the dilemma seemed more urgently existential than it did from down on the ground – if Wits with its social science pedigree and its transformational agenda couldn’t negotiate an answer, was it not time for students to storm the tower again?

“However you want to see it, if you are at this university you are on the fast-track to a job that pays,” said Professor Tawana Kupe. “Implying, you have joined the ranks of the elite.” We were sitting in his executive office with its view over the jacarandas and oaks, and Kupe was in no mood to indulge in wordplay – as Wits University’s deputy vice-chancellor for advancement, human resources and transformation, he was at the frontline of negotiations; Habib’s A-team had been going at it in the Council Chamber since 8am, and Kupe could give me half-an-hour before he needed to get back. “So you can’t say that these protests are a revolt by the masses of the people, or the workers, or the ordinary people who are landless. However, I would say that the protests are a symptom of the larger unrealised expectations that South Africans have had since 1994.”

And there was my epiphany, an insight into a mode of thinking that defined the situation even as it responded to it: the process was transparently and necessarily one of fluidic give-and-take, and it required a handle on the larger context that a seat of higher learning was in a perfect position to provide. For Kupe, although every last student and lecturer at Wits was by definition privileged, what was happening at South Africa’s universities was reflective of the undercurrents that were buffeting the great majority of people. The latter, according to Kupe, had directly entered the conversation via the outsourced workers, who were a sub-fraction of what was indeed the larger working class.

Which was when, for the first time in ages, I heard somebody mention the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) in a single sentence.

“Is it an accident that these protests happen at a time when Cosatu, for example, has kind of fragmented? Or is not as strong as it used to be? Or, working through the alliance partnership with the ANC and the SACP, has not been able to push the ANC enough? I mean, wasn’t that the constant refrain of [former Cosatu leader] Zwelinzima Vavi, or even the current guys left in Cosatu? They complain about labour broking and all that, which is where outsourced workers come from.”

Kupe noted too that it was “interesting” how the protests flared up just as the ANC’s electoral support was shown to be waning. He wanted to make clear that he wasn’t one of those people who believed that the ANC had been so totally weakened that it had lost all power, just that it was no longer fulfilling the expectations of the large majority. And it was no accident either, he said, that this coincided with the emergence of working class parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which in nine months (his emphasis) had grabbed 6% of the national vote.

Then it was back to the details as manifested at Wits and its ideological and spiritual twin, the University of Cape Town (UCT).

“I mean, at Wits and even now at UCT, these are universities that have significant representation of black people. At Wits, as much as 75% of students are now black. And, especially talking about Wits, these are not rich people. UCT has more middle class students, but it still has a significant number of people coming through from lower income families. So to some extent institutions like Wits and UCT are becoming a microcosm of society. And it’s interesting that you can now see, at both Wits and UCT, racial solidarity from some middle class students who are white.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“What does it mean, the racial solidarity?”

“Well, people haven’t unconsciously, because of their privileges of the past, people haven’t simply said, ‘This has nothing to do with me’. Some white students have consciously stood in the front lines of the protest.”

I knew, of course, that there was a little more to it than that. “There seems to be a lot of cynicism from black social commentators,” I said. “‘So you put your white body on the line, so what? You still go back to your homes in Parkhurst.’”

“Yes, there will be those contradictions. And this is not new, by the way. Remember, even in the struggle, there were parties that thought, ‘No, white people who are trying to oppose apartheid, they are still doing it from a position of privilege. And they are less likely to be arrested than others.’”

At this point in the dialogue the professor laughed, a hearty chuckle, which may or may not have been an appropriate response to the intensity of the situation – it all depended on whether you thought his vantage point as a Zimbabwean counted for him, against him, or neither.

“Yes,” he said, after another moment’s reflection. “Those people who put their privilege on the line, even if it was taken away, it would not remove the structural factors. Criticism taken. The forces here are much larger. And also the critique should go to the driver that was supposed to deal with this, and even deal with people who continue to have privilege.”

2. The blame

“It’s very nice to just beat up on the ANC,” said Kupe. “But the ANC didn’t take power in the same context that the liberation movement in Ghana took power, for example. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ghanas, the Kenyas and others had much more space economically. This is not to say that the colonial structures in those countries have been totally dismantled, but they had much more space to institute welfare programmes and redistribution-type mechanisms.”

We were now deep in the territory of African development theory, a pet subject of Kupe’s, and a topic on which he had been waxing eloquently and revealingly since first I had sat in one of his (disclosure alert) postgraduate political economy lectures at Rhodes University in 1999.

“In the ‘60s and ‘70s the hegemony of neoliberalism was not there,” he continued. “In fact, most of Europe was basking in welfare-ist tendencies. And remember, there was the Cold War to help. People could align themselves with the Soviet Union and get some form of aid. By the time 1994 arrived, neoliberalism had had a lot of space to consolidate and become the norm.”

The neoliberal ideology, according to Kupe, had already enjoyed a 15-year solid run in Africa on the back of the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank when, in the first heady moments of South African liberation, the country unveiled its own version – the macro-economic strategy known as GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution). By the mid-1990s, said Kupe, the Soviet Union itself was going through a “neoliberal fire-sale privatisation” of state assets.

“Again, I want to make it clear. When you speak like I am speaking now, it sounds as if you are making excuses. It sounds as if you want to say that the ANC had no agency, no space to make its own decisions. But no, what I am in fact saying is that the ANC had less space than the liberation movements that came to power in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1994, the ANC could not play the superpowers off against each another.”

He mentioned Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, who could “literally get away with anything.” For instance, “Create a one-party state like Daniel Arap Moi did in Kenya, and still be a solid ally of the British government and the United States government, with no democratic freedoms whatsoever.” He laughed again. “You cant do that now!” And then he immediately corrected himself. “Well, I suppose you can do it. [Abdel Fatah] el-Sisi is doing it in Egypt.”

3. The strategy

Kupe had begun to look nervously at his watch. “So prof,” I asked, “as the deputy vice-chancellor in charge of transformation, what’s the strategy?”

“That is a very big question,” he said.

“I know, but you’re in a rush.”

“Okay. Well, there are certain things that have happened at Wits which show that some of the decisions we’ve taken have been quite correct. I’ll go back to the example I gave you. In 21 years, Wits has become 75% black. In 21 years! And this at a university that’s historically white, where you once needed a minister’s permit to study if you were black. Wits has used quite a lot of its own financial aid to augment the NSFAS [National Student Financial Aid Scheme]. But as rising costs of education have come in, diversification has been threatened.”

Kupe wanted me to see what he called the “interplay”. When Wits had the fiscal space to do something, he said, it did something. It actually enabled more black students to enroll, so that a little over two decades later it was not facing the same transformational dilemma as Stellenbosch University. “I would like to stress that example,” Kupe said, “Wits is not where Stellenbosch is.” And Wits didn’t do this, he continued, by simply lowering its entrance requirements. “The students at Wits all come in on the same points. Wits and UCT have some of the strictest entrance requirements in the country.”

It was time, now, for my second epiphany. “But then of course when government grants or subsidies kept falling below inflation, it forced Wits to increase its fees, and so begin to threaten its diversification. Here is where the explosion happened.”

Government subsidies, according to Kupe, began to fall below inflation in the last three to five years. “People think that this is a new excuse,” he said, “recently invented by university management to get them off the hook.” Amongst Kupe’s previous roles as deputy vice chancellor was this little item: his responsibility, ending in 2014, for all finances at the main university and each of its subsidiaries. “One of the things I had to start doing in early 2013 was present to the financial committee, and I kept on telling them that subsidies have not increased as much as inflation. ‘The slack is being taken up by double digit increases in fees,’ I said, ‘this is not sustainable.’ We said this almost three years ago, but we didn’t have the street power that the students now have.”

Kupe stressed that he wasn’t at the university in 1999/2000 when the outsourcing of workers began, but he wanted to offer his understanding anyway. “The problem was that in order to cut their costs and re-engineer their businesses, one of the solutions was found in outsourcing particular kinds of services. In those days, university finances were in bad shape too. Wits was not actually gaining in student numbers. And so they had all these programmes to cut costs and increase income”

And while that, said Kupe, went a long way to explaining things, it could not be delinked from the state’s economic policies. As part of the neoliberal agenda, he emphasised, the South African state began to demand from publicly funded institutions that they find and implement commercial revenue streams.

The 2015 student protests, according to Kupe, have proved once and for all that the model is not sustainable. “It’s not sustainable to have the dominant funding of public institutions coming from commercial sources, especially for those institutions which historically have been on the economic margins. You are going to undermine other social goals if you go that way. And this might be a wake-up call to the state, not just the ruling party. They need to have a more thorough debate about what economic policies they should pursue in this kind of society with its history. This is actually a very big question. It is not just about higher education, which could be said to be the preserve of a small elite. You have the medical arena, for instance, where the best healthcare is in the private hospitals, but they don’t serve the majority of the people.”

On the off-chance I could flush anything else out the tree, I took a shot. What did any of this have to do with the Wits negotiation strategy?

“To try and sort out the university issue only and not think about the big economic question is a form of short-termism. You are looking at the symptom and not the cause.”

There was someone at the door, and Kupe got up from his seat to have a quick word. He told me when he returned that he was supposed to meet one of the negotiators from the student collective, to hammer out the agreement.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“How close are you?”

Kupe said he didn’t want to trumpet the answer to that in public.

“You don’t?”

“No, no. The students would take it as serious arrogance.”

“Can I say you’re in final stages of negotiations?”

“You can say I hope we’re in final stages of negotiations. You’ve seen what’s happened to UCT. They keep on saying ‘we are done’, and then there’s an eruption.”

Final question: given the student protests around inequality and race arising in Ivy League universities like Oxford, Yale and Harvard, was there some sort of global zeitgeist coming out of South Africa?

Kupe swallowed his visible distaste, and answered anyway. “Yes, but we have that propensity for exceptionalism in South Africa, don’t we? These things have been simmering for a long time. Has the media been looking properly? I mean, after the global financial crisis, what exactly was happening at US universities with the slashes and cuts?”

We agreed, then, that global structural inequalities were not only coming to the fore as a media event in 2015, but that they were beginning to be filtered through the lens of race.

“I don’t like to say that life moves in cycles,” Kupe offered in closing, “because it sounds like fate. But the hegemony of neoliberalism might now be facing a huge onslaught. The welfare state and things like that came under serious assault in the 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan being the revolutionaries. Perhaps it has run its course now. People are beginning to say, ‘Enough.’ ” DM

Photo: Professor Tawana Kupe (Sally Shorkend)