The argument: Student organisations aligned to opposition parties are wrestling control of SRCs from the ANC-aligned alliance of ANC Youth League, Young Communist League and South African Students Congress. In my days of SRC Vice-President at the University of Cape Town, I was actually a representative of SASCO on the SRC.
It has been my pleasure to act as 'political analyst' for the Rapport and it is a new experience to see my words quoted in Afrikaans. They did not print my comments that the ANC-aligned organisations are clearly still dominating and that one should not make too much of the EFF victory at Vaal University of Technology and the University of Limpopo (which is the home ground of the infamous EFF leader, Julius Malema), and DASO's victories at Fort Hare University, at UCT and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University; what they rather printed were my comments that it is a significant development that SASCO et al lost these campuses, especially Fort Hare, and the more general comment, which goes back to research into student politics of the 1960s/70s, that student politics is a "micro-cosmos" of "big politics".
The Rapport article can be accessed here.
And this is what was printed of my comments:
"Volgens Thierry Luescher, assistent-direkteur vir institusionele navorsing by die Universiteit van die Vrystaat, is studente – veral dié uit die middelklas – toenemend op soek na alternatiewe tot die ANC. “Swart kiesers se aanvaarding van Daso is ’n belangrike wending. Vyf jaar gelede sou dit nie gebeur het nie. Dit is waarskynlik deel van die Lindiwe- en Maimane-effek.”
Gebeure op universiteitskampusse is ’n mikrokosmos van nasionale politiek, sê Luescher. “Studentepolitiek sê vir jou ’n paar maande voor die tyd wat in ‘groot politiek’ gaan gebeur. Die jeugstem is ’n groot stem, dit móét ernstig opgeneem word.”
Sowat 5,8 miljoen kiesers op die kiesersrol is 29 jaar en jonger, en sowat 310 000 is 18 of 19 jaar oud. "
