LAST week a familiar scene played itself out at the University of Zululand’s main campus.
Some students, motivated by annoyance about missing registration deadlines, thought bash-trash-and-burn tactics were acceptable means of displaying their displeasure and getting the university administration’s attention.
According to reports a security booth was set on fire, the western residential buildings and dining hall area were wrecked, the chapel’s windows and doors destroyed, gates ripped out, roads blocked with garden benches, and so on.
All this mayhem simply because students missed their registration deadline because of a ‘lack of financial services’. One assumes this means they did not have enough money to pay for their study fees.
Welcome to the real world.
Nobody is unsympathetic towards young people wanting to advance themselves, especially those from poverty-stricken rural areas desperately wanting to escape their situation of hopelessness.
But economic realities dictate all our lives. Hundreds of thousands of young people would give anything to study for a degree, but they can’t because they also don’t have rich parents and they can’t access bursaries or loans.
So they do the hard yards working as waiters/waitresses in restaurants or take any menial job and patiently save till they can get a foot in at university or college. They are the ones who eventually make it in life because they learn quickly that nothing comes free or easy, but that patience, understanding the realities and working hard, bring success.
Miracles
These young people don’t turn up and expect some miracle from government or the tertiary institutions to open the doors of learning and then trash the place in anger when they discover money doesn’t grow on trees.
All salary earners have the desire to drive luxury German cars and lounge about on pool decks at opulent homes, but they can’t because business principles determine salaries and not emotional wishful thinking.
The problem, of course, is that the pie-in-the-sky expectations created by politicians and limp-wristed university managements running up unsustainable debt bills of hundreds of millions of Rands while bowing to student demands in the past, have fomented the culture of entitlement befuddling the new generations’ minds.
The sooner the match- and crowbar-wielding mobs realise that intelligent and civilised conflict resolution bring better long-term results and that the handout syndrome illness they suffer from gets one nowhere fast, they can enter the real world where success is achieved through diligence and hard work – and nothing else.
What the hot-heads on campus must also begin to realise is that public patience with their kindergarten tantrums is wearing thin.
It is their hard-earned tax money students are so casually wasting year after year.
As an aside though, university managements must also wake up to the fact that proactive communication will go a long way to address student frustrations before slash and burn levels are reached.
