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Prof Shireen Motala is the South African Research Chair in Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg. Since the advent of democracy in 1994, the South African government has relentlessly pursued equity in education, despite increasingly limited public finances. While discrimination in social spending has reduced, with race no longer a criterion, inequalities remain because of the high costs of achieving fiscal parity in education. In higher education, slowly growing fiscal inputs are not translating into greater efficiency and quality outcomes. As such, questions persist about whether the current approach to equity is adequate, and whether differential redistribution that favours the underprivileged has taken place. ....
Although some variant of the #FeesMustFall saga returns with metronomic regularity at the start of each academic year, it always seems to catch both government and universities by surprise. The week ending on Friday, 12 March 2021, saw student protests at the universities of the Free State, Cape Town, Wits and Pretoria; government “reprioritising” the budget for the higher education sector, and “an innocent bystander”, Mthokozisi Ntumba, a 35-year-old father of three, and a recent MA graduate, dead. All of this, especially the death of Ntumba, is unspeakable, yet it generates a relentless flow of verbiage, from President Cyril Ramaphosa, to the Wits SRC, to Police Minister Bheki Cele, “condolences” are offered to the Ntumba family. President of the Wits SRC, Mpendulo Mfeka, assures us that Ntumba “did not die in vain”, and on Friday, 12 March, the Wits SRC calls for De Beer Street in Braamfontein to be renamed after the dead husband and father to ensure ....