The spectre of an imploding tertiary education system looms like a swarm of giant spindly-legged Martian cyborgs, complete with bulging green Muscoidean eyes straight out of H.G. Wells’ dystopian imagination, oiled by the forebodingly rich timbre of Richard Burton’s narration.
The country cowers under the Fallists’ imposed portent, bended knee at the rancid exhortations of mini-me dictators brandishing weapons of mass delusion. The end game is a zero-sum one in which fatuous destruction impregnates sterile automatons hotwired to regurgitate populist sound bytes to a ceaselessly metronomic beat.
This time last year the #FeesMustFall movement was the public darling, having succeeded in obtaining an audience with he-who-will-not-be-accountable, gaining binding undertakings. It was a significant moment in our democratic history, where the assorted riff-raff poo-chuckers and dustbin arsonists were pushed to the fringes by a swell of disciplined mainstream student anger.
Fast forward a year later and the riffraff are back at their zenith, having hijacked the movement’s legitimacy with sjamboks, petrol bombs, intimidation and a little help from an advocate-cum-politician, our very own self-styled Savile Row Che Mpofu.
Wits University’s riffraff is at the vanguard of its own colonisation efforts, and a certain Mcebo (aka Sisulu) Dlamini is the Hitler admiring firebrand hijacker-in-chief. Now Mr Dlamini is generous with a taradiddle but parsimonious with the truth, having passed himself off as the love child of Zwelakhe Sisulu and a Swazi princess and laying claim to degrees in actuarial science and nuclear physics while simultaneously studying towards an undergraduate degree in politics and an honours degree in mathematical statistics.
In May 2015 Dlamini was removed as SRC president for misconduct, but did graduate with a Bachelor of Arts. A video of his graduation provides a glimpse into the maniacal supersized ego: one could be misled into thinking he was graduating with all four degrees. Delusion and deception, it appears, are hallmarks of populist personality cults, and Dlamini has fine examples to follow in the likes of Number One and his very own revolutionary hero, Julius Malema.