EFF CONDEMNS UKZN APARTHEID AND ANTI-INTELLECTUAL RULES OF BANNING POLITICAL GATHERINGS

26 July, 2017

The EFF condemns the UKZN rules that ban free political gatherings in campuses. Over the last two days, university security has frustrated, intimidated and suppressed EFF gatherings organized towards the EFF Anniversary celebrations. The university argued that this is due to the fact that they do not allow political rallies in their campuses. We condemn this as it is consistent with apartheid and fundamentally anti-intellectual. 

A university should be a space of free contestation of ideas. It must embrace and protect itself as an arena of intellectual and robust debate. Any learning without free expression of ideas is pure indoctrination and must be rejected. Thus, UKZN by virtue of banning political gatherings, has essentially banned free expression of ideas. 

Above all, it is inconsistent with both the latter and the spirit of the constitution. Freedom of Assembly is a matter of our Bill of Rights without which we could never claim to have broken with an apartheid past. Students in UKZN are not allowed, in the same way as they were not under apartheid, to gather and exchange political ideas. When the students do so, the university surrounds them with men and women of guns; the form of intimidation we saw under apartheid. 

The EFF will never agree to anyone anywhere in the country to deny us of the freedom of assembly. This right, we shall protect with everything we have; and whomsoever invents rules against it, shall be met with the full defiance of the EFF. Finally, we call on students activists everywhere in South Africa to always be ready to defy any university rules that are inconsistent with our constitution. It is a shame that UKZN Managment, in an effort to suppress the FeesMustFall Movement has elected to do backward and anti-intellectual a strategy employed by inhuman regimes like apartheid, colonization and nazism.

Statement issued by Economic Freedom Fighters, 26 July 2017