Story 4
Dear Ma
This is why I am part of shutting down Wits...In the beginning of the year, during financial exclusions, a student came up to me requesting help. She told me that she had recently moved to Gauteng from Limpopo with her family, Alexander to be exact. Her father had just received work in Johannesburg, nothing significant at all, but work nonetheless. Her mother, however, is unemployed. She lives with both her parents and 4 siblings in a rented one bedroom cottage in the middle of Alex.
To her fortune, she received NSFAS to begin her studies as a first year Accounting student. However, she was rejected a res offer because of her proximity to the university. This meant that she had to endure studying in a shared environment with 6 other people, 4 of them being younger siblings, who too were in school. She consistently gave her entire stipend, of R1000, to her mother, in order to cover living expenses. She did this with the promise that her father would cover her transport expenses to school. But he hardly met his promise. He was an alcoholic, so he selfishly drank his family's income and subsequently sacrificed his daughter's transport money to school. She would go weeks without going to school as result, and it didn't help that she had no textbooks to supplement her home studying.
As a result, she failed. She failed because she found herself in a compromising position. She failed because she lost in the lottery of birth and her poverty dragged her out of school and into its cycle. Her poor academic performance lost her NSFAS- and as a result she was financially excluded, after being readmitted in WRC1. Ma, this lady soldiered her way through 2014, but she became a casualty. The reality is, there are over 4000 casualties of financial exclusion each year. She is not an isolated case. The Wits factory rejects the poor and produces the rich at the graduation line. Capable students are handicapped by their poverty. This is evil Ma! We need to change this system as students. I cannot sit back, graduate and thank God for my good scholarship, and say "shame" when I hear a student left school because of fees. No Ma. I cannot be passive in a system that rejects the same black students that your very brothers and sisters raised. I can't.
That is why I'd rather opt to destabilise this system in the very short term to reap macro benefits for my brothers and sisters in the long term. Shutting down Wits is not an act of irresponsibility, but it is an act of necessary civil disobedience, the kind that brings meaningful attention to the financial reality of black students. This is why I do this Ma, please understand. And I will be there tomorrow at 12pm in concourse, offering myself to the revolution.
My children will thank me Mama.