Mashilo Mnisi
Well, okay! The UCT students were just marching early in February sin their protest routine against the university’s austerity demeanour for financially excluding students. Not that they were intending to disrupt the 2025 parliamentary budget vote speech. But the budget vote speech was somehow disrupted since it was postponed – something unprecedented – perhaps it could have had been the students’ march or was it the VAT?
Clearly it wasn’t the opposition because all the opposition parties yearned the speech to continue, but because they don’t wield any power, the speech was still postponed despite these oppositions demanding it to happen. Let’s just say the GNU – or is it a coalition of government? Whatever that is – must be operating as the lead government and the opposition. And one could tell that their sabre-rattling was felt by the so-called oppositions.
And the speech was stopped, and so was the VAT increase – but definitely not indefinite as it was set tentatively for March 12 that the Speaker of Parliament demurely blurted – and it did happen but still South Africans’ questions were never answered. Education was in the past allocated with a huge bulk of government’s spending, but yet students continued to struggle with registrations and tuition fees this year – paying unreasonably colossal amounts of funds. Or perhaps we’re missing something here. Could that be the mis-budgeting or corruption – as we saw that with the student’s fiscal whirlwind, NSFAS. Or it’s just a misnomer?
There’re departments – and in fact this one in particular – that could divert budgets to subsidise and relieve students and learners alike to study for free – and it could also extend to free sanitary for every girl in the country. But we’re not going to mention it inasmuch as it’s not timely but rather sensitive to do at this point in time. It also leaves so much to be seen what’s going to be done to the high unemployment rate among youth – especially graduates – since there weren’t enough measures in the budget to directly promote job creation.
