Programme Director
Dean of Students Pamela Dube
Officials from the Department of Higher Education and Training
Officials from the Centre for Education Policy Development
Representatives of student organisations

My regards to the Minister of Higher Education for inviting me to this engagement about student leadership in universities.

This event takes place within the context of unprecedented challenges facing the higher education sector since the dawn of our democracy.

The issue of leadership remains critical for both students and university management.

I was recently invited to engage a group of student leaders on the concept of leadership, their role and the urgent need to destroy the hero that is socially constructed within us.

I believe that some of the concepts that we explored with those student leaders are relevant today as they were some few weeks ago so I want to continue with that discourse for the purpose of our engagement today.

Che Guevarea once said "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people are their own liberators”.

The significance of this lies in the fact that young people should not socially construct heroes but find heroes within themselves.

To identify an external human being or institution as a hero or as an agent to champion your collective vision, goals and aspirations is to disempower yourself and kill the innate leader within you.

We always say that the youth of 1976 were oppressed. Yes, they lived under the brutal system of apartheid, declared a crime against humanity.

But what we forget is that their liberation and empowerment began when they took to the streets against that very system of apartheid, and not when they defeated it.

Herein lies the 'madness' of Paulo Frere, that in the process of liberating ourselves, we also liberate the oppressor.

But more importantly, and my interpretation, that the moment we take up arms or rise up in peaceful protest against an oppressive system, we express the extent of our freedom or liberation.

We are free to say enough is enough and that this should stop.

The first step that Tsietsi Mashinini and others took was to undermine the 'supernatural-imposition' of the Verwoerdian system of apartheid and to de-legitimise it as an institution. They empowered themselves to fight it and thereby taking its power and presence in society. That was true leadership.

The fight against oppression, to be bound in chains, to live under racial oppression, to have restricted movement, to be denied education; but more importantly to declare war against the system that encroached on their freedom in the classroom, in their homes and streets and every facet of their lives is in itself leadership, freedom and the agencification of power in the hands of the oppressed.

This is important because in philosophy—"freedom is the realisation of necessity”.

As society develops, and as we build a higher form of society from that of yesterday and break the boundaries and push the limits which were within our realm, we begin to realise that with our freedom, there are more wants and more needs in the reproduction of our lives.

Suddenly, "Down with Afrikaans” in schools in 1976 becomes "Rhodes Must Fall” or "Luister”.

That realisation comes with the collectivism of leadership to our own struggles and the fact that no individual—no matter how powerful they are—including Mandela, could have mastered the struggle against apartheid and won.

This is not to disprove the "Great Man Theory” in leadership, who comes in at times because of context and as a result of strategy, but this is intended to empower the leader in you and urge you not to put your leadership capabilities on tender and open for procurement.

We have seen the rise of secular and cult leadership, sometimes created by us as young people and without knowledge of the consequences of such "externalisation” of power and leadership throughout our history.

If you read our history, timelines are symbolised rarely by big events that catapulted history forward but by men and women who drove those events or who lost their lives as a consequence of those events.

Our 'externalisation of power and leadership' brings to shame our arrogant slogan: "We are leaders TODAY and not TOMORROW.

We occupy different leadership ROLES in the spaces we occupy and therefore should make best of such spaces, and therefore should not allow 'the cult' to play God with our hopes and aspirations as though we are incapable of leading ourselves, and of realizing our own freedom.

The moment we apportion an individual or institutions amongst us the superhero status and hand them the red cape, we take a part of ourselves, our abilities and our legitimate role in the transformation of society and hand them over to that person or institution.

We end up disempowering ourselves. To liberate ourselves, we have to be the anti-heroes; we have to free ourselves from the tentacles of heroes, no matter how powerful we or they believe they are.

The popular narrative in our society is that leadership failure in parliament or in the state constitutes failure in society.

There is also the return of the 1994 narrative that had died down but seems to be rearing its ugly head: We told you that they would not be able to govern.

The current narrative is that 'the ANC was handed a country that was best run, with proper institutions and a working economy (and a strong Rand to the Dollar, I must mention) and they messed it up'.

Daily, FW de Klerk and his Foundation, for instance, are at pains firstly to justify why it was important to remove their behind from the lid of a boiling pot that was resisting against apartheid, and secondly, why it is important to bring back a reformed leadership that will protect white privilege, even if it is black leadership.

But I digress.

Through this, on a daily basis political leaders are subjected to scrutiny and critical analysis, and rightly so because the consequences of their actions have an effect to all of us.

Through the ballot we seem to have externalized our power and leadership, and would therefore raise our hands in despair when they fail, or build monuments for them if they succeed (for future generations to bring these down) as though they possess some supernatural powers that we believe we do not have.

We make them into heroes whose success further affirms their godly status, and their failure we regard as our own failure and therefore an anti-progress.

We waste time looking for political heroes when we are supposed to be preoccupied with transforming and democratizing the spaces which we occupy and lead.

Why have we abandoned our own leadership?

One of the many lessons about the actions of the youth of '76 was that their sacrifices was intended to empower us to be able to take further the ideals which they fought for.

The hallmark of our constitution, and the Freedom Charter, was to put power into the hands of our people.

Sometimes, we tend to negate this power, transfer it into the hands of politicians or other institutions with the hope that they will come, donned in their cape, to liberate us, even on issues which we should be taking leadership on.

There are responsibilities that those in power should take. We obviously cannot make excuses for government failure.

People participate in elections and elect governments and pay their taxes mainly because we expect government to take certain responsibilities with the powers, laws and resources they have in their control.

But the government, given the nature of our transition, may not be able to do things without the support of our people and their application of the power that they have in their midst.

If we want transformation in the spaces that we occupy, we need to take a lead.

If there is still racism, gender exploitation, ageism and other forms of backwardness that are remnants of apartheid or the results of new forms of exploitation, we have to confront these.

Some political parties, mainstream media and other institutions that have positioned themselves as anti-state can only succeed to push the narrative that the ANC government has failed solely because we have also agencified the state as the only institution of power that can pursue our own development and progress.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela hammered the idea that we were not yet free, and that voting was only the beginning for the battle for freedom.

By this, he meant that only if people may not interpret voting as equal to reversing the long and many years of apartheid and colonialism, and see themselves as part and parcel of the struggle for freedom, and as collective leaders.

The slogan power to the people means that the state cannot apportion all the power unto itself and be the ultimate institution that delivers freedom. Power to the people means empowering people to be able to take charge of their own destinies in the spaces that they occupy.

In schools, churches, social clubs, workplaces, hospitals, ward committees and every institution of peoples' power through organs of self-rule.

This is at the centre of the challenges that faces our generation, and no matter what government we elect, and what hero we construct, our challenges will still remain.

But in the process we also exonerate other leaders in society, religious, business, school, university, stokvels, civil servants and many other leaders whose decisions affect millions of our people and sometimes act in reverse of the progress made by the political leadership.

The whole notion of transformation is that it not only happen at a higher level, but that in spaces that we all occupy and use them as platforms to effect greater changes.

There are significant examples of leadership and transformation displayed by students in recent times.

The different roles and approaches that were displayed by your leadership when confronted with financial or academic exclusions - for instance.

Some would burn down the campus because if they cannot access it then no one should whilst others would use their SRC coffers to raise more money to ensure that more students are included in academia.

This notion of leadership, of course, arises out of our history of the struggle against apartheid and colonialism. At moments in the epoch of our struggles arose men and women who took the centre stage and sometimes became martyrs of our struggles.

Chief Bambatha, Sekhukhune, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani, Steve Biko, Solomon Mahlangu, Barney Molokoane, Oliver Tambo and many others who assumed the centre stage and also became the targets of the colonial and apartheid regimes.

They took the bigger risk, they put their heads on the block and some even died as a result.

But they could not have had their names etched in the annals of history had they not been confident that they have the support of the majority of the oppressed behind them.

Society is structured in such a way that we can only have one priest for the parish, one bishop for the denomination, one Commander in Chief for the army, one commander for the battalion, one king or queen for a nation or tribe, one captain for a sports team or a ship, one president for a country or a golf club.

All of these people are nothing without the collective wisdom and strength of those whom they lead.

This reminds me of the poem, Questions from a Worker who Reads, by Bertolt Brecht:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?

In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph? 
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep? 
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors? 
Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill?
So many reports. 
So many questions.

The challenge for our generation is to shed off our shoulders the heavy load of heroes and cult-personalities.

We have to believe in the power that we have and realize that they are dependent on this power.

Some are even feeding of it like parasites only to use it at our expense.

So what is and what becomes of student leadership on our campuses today.

What is the role of student leadership in navigating the transformation discourse that's happening on our campuses? What should we make of it? How does it relate to the broader transformation agenda around campuses, in our communities, in the other areas of society were power has been agencified.

And just like in some campuses, this power still seems to serve the interest of old.

Some institutions were created for an agenda, the reproduction and sustenance of the apartheid agenda.

Although there is legislative transformation, which is revolutionary at a theoretical level, what do we do when this does not resonate with the realities on campus?

Language, yes, but also what it represents: culture, elitism, knowledge production for the few, engagement, discourse, research and therefore to a certain extent an extension of untransformed power and power relations.

What are the issues within which we should be prepared for to enter into compromises in this regard?

What are those issues which we believe entrench and reproduce apartheid social relations that we cannot help but ensure that they are ended.

Can someone say it is my culture, when all it does is to be the continuation of those forms of untransformed power relations?

Universities are important spaces of a modern South Africa. What are the types of citizens that they produce?  Is there a sense of civic duty? Are we developing revolutionaries armed with better knowledge to change society, or have we resigned ourselves to universities producing two forms of societal leaders.

Those who will take further the function of knowledge production and those who, because they have to "'work” become pure economic agents in the production cycle.

As Che declared: "Our universities produced lawyers and doctors for the old social system, but they did not create enough agricultural extension teachers, agronomists, chemists, or physicists. In fact, we do not even have mathematicians.”

Good leadership is about taking responsibility.

We exercise good leadership by taking responsibility to make sure that things go right in our own lives, in our communities, in our organisations, on our campuses and in our country.

Bad leadership is the abdication of responsibility. We outsource this responsibility to super heroes and institutions; we sit back and watch from the side-lines.

We attribute the failure and collapse, at times, of campuses as a failure of central government leadership? Should we not be taking collective responsibility?

It is time that we as young leaders take responsibility. It is time that we truly exercise people's power in our communities and organisations. Young people must be at the forefront of pushing for positive social change. And to do this, it requires youth leadership.

On Tuesday, 6 October, President Jacob Zuma met with Vice-Chancellors and the leadership of all universities in South Africa. The leadership of higher institutions of learning in the country consisted of Universities of South Africa and the University Council Chairs Forum - South Africa. The meeting was held at the request of the two organisations and focused, among other things, on the recent unacceptable levels of violence currently being experienced on some University campuses across the country.

The President stated at the outset that Government recognises and supports the right of university students, like all other members of our society, to protest and to voice their opinions and grievances.

But this right should be exercised with utmost responsibility, ensuring that the rights of other South Africans are not violated in the process.

The President condemned the violence and destruction of property that have taken place at some of our universities in the name of student protests over the past year or so, and most recently at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The meeting agreed that all forms of dispute must be resolved through negotiation and that where wanton acts of criminality take place, the law must take its course.

Other areas of discussion in the meeting included key challenges facing universities at this time such as student financial aid, the increasing politicization of university campuses and transformation of higher education more generally. Government reiterated its commitment to funding poor students in higher education in the context of a constrained fiscal climate.

The management of universities must open up legitimate channels for discussion and dialogue over matters concerning students, with a view to resolving whatever issues they raise. University management must be more proactive and not allow matters to deteriorate to such an extent that students go on a rampage, often due to lack of understanding and knowledge of the situation and spurred by poor communication.

The President also affirmed that institutions of higher learning are open spaces for free speech, academic freedom and independent thinking. Intolerance of opposing ideas is against the very essence of a university. Universities should exemplify how differences of opinion and disputes are resolved, and that it is through the exchange of ideas.

It is therefore completely unacceptable in our democracy that disputes within a university should lead to physical clashes and the disruption of academic programmes.

So my challenge to you as young people: "Do not outsource your responsibility to lead, it should never be on tender. You must lead.

Choose to Lead!

I thank you.