INTRODUCTION

The most inspiring and surprising social movement to shake the South African state since the Treatment Action Campaign of the early 2000s was #FeesMustFall in October 2015. The primary demand – free tertiary education – is audacious. There are various cost estimates, depending upon demand-related assumptions or simply the prevailing political agenda: a spokesperson for the South African minister of higher education and training, Blade Nzimande (who was at the time opposed to fee-free universities), estimated R100 billion a year, although the 2013 figure from the same office was just R23 billion (that is, R27 billion in 2016 inflation-adjusted rands) (Petersen 2015). But even the centre-right Democratic Alliance estimated in late 2015 that free (albeit means-tested) tertiary education would cost R35 billion per annum (Bozzoli 2015). The students’ secondary, immediate demands were that there should be a zero per cent fee increase in 2016 (effectively a 7 per cent+ decrease in fees, given rising inflation) and that all university staff should be paid properly and ‘insourced’. The outsourcing in the early 2000s of low-paid cleaning, security, gardening and similar staff at most institutions had been repeatedly contested before 2015, but never successfully.

As argued below, these tens of billions of rands that should be considered for investment in the students’ future compare favourably with hundreds of billions allocated by state agencies to mega-projects that are largely fossil-intensive (especially based upon coal and oil). The resulting climate change will irrevocably harm the current student generation's future. But will the students come to this realisation, and will it lead to creative political strategies that link issues and constituencies with just as radical a potential as was witnessed in 2015?

Unfortunately, the exceptional mobilisation in October 2015 had degenerated, at the time of writing in April 2016, to a situation characterised by divideand- conquer student defeats at the hands of the ruling party and its allies in the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA). The latter had control of most student representative councils, which in 2016 insisted that there be no further disruptive #FeesMustFall protests on the scale of October 2015. Meanwhile, opportunities to broaden the movement in relation to service delivery protests and the new left trade unionism were not being adequately explored.