Fort Hare’s Unfinished Crisis: The Fight for Student Democracy by Lindokuhle Mponco

You can’t really grasp what’s happening at the University of Fort Hare right now if you see the protest as just about maintenance issues, NSFAS, accommodation, or unpaid student allowances. Those matter, but they’re not the spark that set off this round of protest. The real heart of it is the Student Governance Constitution (SGC) and what it means for student democracy. It comes down to a pretty basic question: Who gets to make the rules for student governance at Fort Hare? The students themselves, or the university administration?

The Struggle That Still Isn’t Over: 2025

To see why this is blowing up again, you have to roll back to October and November 2025. The protests back then were fired up by a bunch of demands: holding SRC elections, re-forming the Institutional Student Parliament (ISP), fixing student funding, infrastructure, accommodation, and general service-delivery failures. But at the core, students were fighting for a say in their own governance. Students didn’t just accept the creation of an interim SRC while the SGC was being changed. They pushed back because they didn’t want an unelected group setting the rules for student democracy.

Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Higher Education eventually stepped in. They saw the mess; no SRC elections, an interim SRC without a proper mandate, and called it out as part of the crisis. The Committee told the university to review the SGC with real student input, and to make SRC elections transparent. So what’s happening with the SGC now? It’s not a new problem. It’s the same fight from 2025, still unresolved.

From Protest to Fixing the Institution

Yeah, the violence and destruction that happened in October was wrong. Breaking down campus buildings hurts students most, and everyone around Fort Hare. But just condemning the destruction misses the point. If you ignore the reasons people are angry, the crisis won’t go away. That’s why the Portfolio Committee and DHET got involved. Fort Hare was in an institutional crisis. They met with Council, management, students, and labor and called for a plan to actually rebuild the university.

Fixing things isn’t just about patching up buildings; it’s about fixing governance, rebuilding trust, and making sure students, workers, management, and Council can operate together in structures people respect.

Council and the Crisis That Still Lingers

During the 2025 crisis, Ms Kuselwa Marala was the Interim Chair of Council, and Prof Judith Favish was Interim Deputy Chair. They were part of university leadership during the interventions. Later, they left those temporary posts. Dr Siyanda Makaula took over as Council Chair, and Dr Yoliswa Mancotywa followed as Deputy. Marala and Favish stayed on the Council, just not at the helm. This isn’t just about who’s in charge. The leadership shifted around, but a lot of the reasons for the crisis in 2025 are still there.

SGC Is at the Center of Everything

You can’t just talk about the SGC in isolation from everything else students are dealing with. Lots of first-time and returning students are still fighting to get funding sorted out. NSFAS and GAP investigations only add more confusion. Accommodation is still a headache, infrastructure’s failing, and basic maintenance keeps being delayed on both campuses. These are real, material problems.

If you don’t have funding, you might not be able to register, eat, travel, or keep your room. If your residence is falling apart, studying isn’t easy. And without real student representation, it’s hard to push the university to sort these problems out. Democracy and service delivery are linked. The SGC is about the political framework that lets students actually organize and fight for better living and studying conditions.

Seeing the Larger Picture

Historical materialism helps you realize these issues are all tied together, they’re not just random complaints. Fort Hare serves a lot of working-class and poor students who need public education, financial aid, and decent accommodation. The university, meanwhile, has its own bureaucracy, limited resources, and its own interests. Those interests don’t always line up with what students need. And that’s where the struggle comes in.

The right response isn’t pointless bureaucracy or just tearing things down. Students should be militant—but organized. Radical, but strategic. Ready to fight but careful to protect the school and resources they rely on.

SASCO and YBMM

This is why you also have to look at what SASCO and YBMM are doing in East London. The issue isn’t about whether every member is “reactionary.” The real question is what are these organizations actually doing? If they block real student action for democratic governance without coming up with a solid alternative for fixing the SGC, funding, infrastructure, and accommodation, then they end up just preserving the status quo. That’s what reactionary politics looks like. Students need to beat that through political education, organizing, and democratic action. Not through personal attacks.

The Haniist-Bikoist Mission

EFF Youth Command? Fort Hare ought to be a center for political education. Students should dig into what the SGC, SRC, ISP, Council, NSFAS, budgets, and decision-making at the university actually mean. This is where Scientific Socialism with Afrocentric Characteristics — Haniism-Bikoism — steps in. Marxism brings in historical materialism and class analysis. Leninism steers organization and discipline. Trotsky helps you link the immediate struggles to transforming the system. Haniism; after Chris Hani; focuses on mass politics, working-class unity, and socialism in a South African context. Bikoism adds African pride, awareness, and liberation. The aim? Turn spontaneous anger into real, organized political action.

From Protest to Real Power

The biggest lesson from October 2025 is that protest on its own isn’t enough. Right now, the fight needs to push for a truly democratic SGC, real SRC elections, a working ISP, solutions for student funding, fair GAP investigations, solid NSFAS administration, reliable infrastructure, livable residences, and institutional accountability.

And, sure, those responsible for the violence must answer for it. What happened during the 2025 chaos has to be investigated based on evidence not hearsay. Fort Hare needs more than patched-up walls; it needs a democratic rebuild. The SGC isn’t just a bureaucratic paper; it’s about who has power. So it’s on revolutionary students to understand, organize, teach, mobilize, and win. That’s how Fort Hare’s unfinished fight in 2025 can become a real movement to remake the university as a center for true student democracy.

The conditions of young people in the CBD of KuGompo City by Lindokuhle Mponco

Walk through the CBD of KuGompo today and ask yourself one question: is this what freedom was supposed to look like? Young people sleeping in abandoned buildings. Young men smoking nyaope before sunrise. Graduates sitting on pavements with CVs nobody will read. Sewage flowing through the streets like it is part of the town’s natural infrastructure. Potholes big enough to damage taxis, businesses collapsing, and police vans driving around after everything has already fallen apart.

This is not “normal”. This is social collapse. South Africa now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. According to Statistics South Africa, youth unemployment for people between 15–34 rose to 46.1% in early 2025, with millions of young people completely excluded from the economy. In reality, many communities know the real number feels much higher. The CBD of KuGompo has become a waiting room for hopelessness. And the worst part? Society has started acting like this is just how young black people are supposed to live.

UbuPhara: The Language of Abandonment

People love insulting young people in the streets. They call them “amaphara”, criminals, junkies and failures. But nobody asks: what created UbuPhara in the first place? Nobody is born wanting to sleep in shop doorways or sniff substances just to survive another day. These conditions are created by poverty, unemployment and social abandonment. When a young person spends years without work, without opportunities and without dignity, society should not be shocked when destruction follows.

Drug abuse in the CBD is no longer hidden. It is visible everywhere. Some young people are using drugs not because they are “evil”, but because hopelessness itself becomes addictive. Escaping reality becomes easier than living in it. Under capitalism, poor youth are treated like rubbish until they become a “crime problem”. Then suddenly politicians want law enforcement and media cameras. But policing poverty is not solving poverty. A young person cannot smoke a CV and become employed.

Crime and Unemployment Are Twins

South Africa’s official unemployment rate reached 32.9% in 2025, while the expanded unemployment rate — which includes discouraged work seekers — climbed above 43%. That means almost half the country is either unemployed or has given up looking for work. In the Eastern Cape, the situation is even worse. The province consistently records some of the highest unemployment figures in the country.

Now think about KuGompo. How many young people wake up every morning with nowhere to go? How many graduates are sitting at home while politically connected people get jobs through corruption and patronage? How many young people survive through gambling, hustling, crime or exploitation because the formal economy has locked them out? Then politicians act surprised when crime increases. Crime is not simply a policing issue. It is an economic issue. A society that refuses to give young people work should never act shocked when survival becomes violent.

The CBD Is Falling Apart

KuGompo’s infrastructure tells its own story. The roads are collapsing. Sewage spills remain unattended for weeks. Streetlights do not work. Public spaces are neglected. Entire sections of the CBD feel abandoned after dark. This is what municipal failure looks like in real life. And it is working-class communities who suffer the most. The rich can move to gated suburbs, drive expensive cars and avoid public infrastructure altogether. The poor cannot escape collapsing municipalities. Infrastructure is political. A city that cannot maintain roads, sanitation and public safety is a city that has stopped caring about its people.

The question young people must ask is simple:

Where is the money going?

Because it certainly is not going into fixing the city.

Haniism-Bikoism: A Different Future

Young people are constantly told there is no alternative. That corruption, unemployment and decay are just “South African problems”. That is a lie. What KuGompo needs is a new political direction rooted in Scientific Socialism with Afrocentric Characteristics — what we may call Haniism-Bikoism. This means combining the revolutionary socialism of Chris Hani with the black consciousness and psychological liberation taught by Steve Biko.

It means understanding that black working-class communities deserve dignity, jobs, housing and democratic power. Imagine if municipalities employed young people directly to:

• repair roads,

• clean communities,

• fix sewage systems,

• renovate abandoned buildings,

• build public housing,

• establish youth cooperatives,

• and run rehabilitation centres.

Imagine if public money served communities instead of tenders. That is Municipal Socialism. Not slogans. Real material change.

Register to Vote — Or Accept More Decay

Many young people say voting changes nothing. But refusing to participate while corrupt politicians continue governing changes even less. Elections alone will never liberate the working class. Real change requires organisation, political education and mass struggle. But voting remains an important weapon. At local government level, ideology matters.

Who controls municipalities determines:

• where money goes,

• who gets jobs,

• which communities develop,

• and whether public resources serve people or politically connected elites.

The Economic Freedom Fighters remains the most credible socialist-oriented political alternative capable of laying the foundations for Municipal Socialism in South Africa. The coming local government elections are not simply about councillors. They are about deciding whether cities like KuGompo continue collapsing or begin rebuilding around the needs of the working class. Because if young people do not shape the future politically, they will continue suffering economically.

And the truth is painful:

A society that abandons its youth is already dying.