Faizel Patel – 16/03/2021
The editor-in-chief of News24 Adriaan Basson says former President Jacob Zuma is responsible for the current wave of student protests across the country demanding free tertiary education.
Basson has written a thought-provoking opinion piece in which he accuses Zuma of not only stealing the people of the country’s money, but also their dreams.
It is estimated that South Africa has lost anything between R500 billion to R1.5 trillion during the state capture years of Zuma.
Speaking to Radio Islam, Basson says he tried to trace the root cause of the fees protests and discovered it leads back to Zuma.
“I tracked it back to the unilateral announcement by Jacob Zuma in December 2017 on the first day of the ANC’s Nasrec conference where he out of the blue without any pre-warning to Treasury or to the Department of Higher Education announced free education for all poor and working class students.”
Basson says students took Zuma’s comments to heart despite many others seeing it as a possible re-election ploy.
“I can just imagine that if you are poor child in South Africa who has got the ability to further your studies at a university, that you will see any announcement by the head of state that you can now study for free as an absolute victory for you. Of course, that is the utopia we strived towards.”
Basson says Zuma’s comments caused damage, adding that free education was never realistic and that the former president tried to buy almost his legacy as the person who “gathers free education, but there wasn’t money in the bank.”
“That is now the problem that Cyril Ramaphosa and Blade Nzimande must face is how to address the situation and ultimately reverse that decision without political weakening themselves to be seen as the enemy of free education.”
Basson says while Zuma cannot be blamed for all of South Africa’s problems, the former president exacerbated and hastened the issues we have in the country and did not fix them during his term in office.
Listen to the interview with Adriaan Basson
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