Police, protesting students clash in South Africa
Clashes have broken out between police and students demonstrating against planned tuition fee hike outside the parliament in South Africa’s port city of Cape Town.
The scuffle erupted after police used stun grenades to disperse hundreds of students, who had pushed their way through the gates of the parliament complex and converged at the entrance of the national assembly building on Wednesday.
During the confrontations, demonstrators kicked police shields, threw bottles and sang popular protest songs as well as anti-apartheid slogans.
They further demanded to speak to South African Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande while chanting, “We want Blade, and we want Blade.”
The clashes come as universities in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria and other cities have suspended lectures during several days of protests against the planned rise in tuition fees.
On Tuesday, a meeting between university dons and Nzimande resolved to cap fee hike at 6 percent for 2016, above inflation. The minister noted that the government could not afford to provide free education for poor students.
Some student leaders, however, criticized the plan saying it will deepen inequality.
“They know very well that we can’t afford 6 percent. We want free quality education,” said Vuyani Pambo, the chair of the left-wing opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Students believe that the government plan will further hurt African students, who had already been struggling with limited access to universities during decades of apartheid rule, or racial segregation, which lasted during the late 1940s through the 1990s.
Several South African universities have been the scene of regular protests this year, targeting the limited racial transformation of education since the end of the apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994.
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