UKZN lecturers join students in solidarity demonstration

Lecturers staged a picket in solidarity with their students yesterday at a National day of Action outside the UKZN Pietermaritzburg campus on Alan Paton Road. There has been unrest at all of the UKZN campuses after Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, announced that universities would be allowed to determine their own fee increments on condition that these do not exceed 8 percent. 

Organiser and lecturer, Dr Clint Le Bruyn, says  students are their lecturers first priority. Le Bruyn says the lecturers are calling for an end to violence on campus and for government to increase funding for higher education.

"The students are being treated as if they are criminals just for protest. You can hear this in the manner in which campus security reports on student movements. It is as if all the students are thugs, violent, dangerous or suspicious," he said.

Meanwhile a centre involved in the study of the South African Society believes that university leaders are those most likely to be victims of a decolonised curriculum. Dr Amasa Ndofirepi of the Mzala Nxumalo Centre says that it is possible for students to be taught a decolonised curriculum. 

One of the calls after the demand for free education during the fees must fall campaign, was for a decolonised curriculum. Ndofirepi believes that the Vice-Chancellors and those in the higher education hierarchy do not want the curriculum to be decolonised.

" For me to change the curriculum or to decolonise it to suit the African conditions is almost not achievable especially given the calibre of those in leadership roles in universities because they survive on colonial era," he said.

(File photo)