The following was contributed by ASFL local coordinator Michael Adu Gyekye

In the past few weeks,  international news reports have been awash with stories about mass demonstrations by students in South Africa. The students protested over hikes in university fees and called for a cap in tuition, with some even demanding a complete scrapping of university fees.

The huge number of protesters in the demonstrations and the intensity of the campaign has extracted intriguing parallels between it and the Soweto student protests staged during the height of the country’s anti-apartheid struggle some decades ago.

To offer some relief to the clamorous demonstrators, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma announced a 0% increase in university fees for the year 2016, following a round of meetings with student leaders.

It is difficult to deny that the frustration of the disgruntled students tags at the heartstrings. Even more sympathetic is their craving for affordable university education to enhance access to tertiary schooling and improve human capital development in a country where for decades, equal opportunity for all citizens was severely undermined by the infamous policy of apartheid.

At the moment, it is hoped that the student protesters would be provided maximum security and space by the South African authorities to give full vent to their grievances and exercise their panoply of civil liberties as all stakeholders continue to look for a durable mutually-satisfactory solution to the impasse.  

Taxes Pay For Free University Education 

Nonetheless, it needs to be pointed out that university education must not be legislated to be provided free of charge as demanded by sections of the protesters. This perspective is informed by a host of reasons explained below.

First, it must be understood that provision of education in schools is an economic activity. In other words, it is not a non-scarce service that can be received by anyone free of charge at no expense to anyone. That is, the provision of education in schools requires sustained investment of material and human capital/resources to make possible. Receipt of revenue from its beneficiaries is what makes possible the sustained investment and maintenance of academic and administrative standards. The government cannot legislate education to be free to change these facts. The consequence of free education therefore implies the absorption of the costs involved by the government. In South Africa, ‘’it is estimated if higher education was to be funded solely through taxpayer subsidies then a further R71-billion, over and above the existing R25-billion, would be necessary’’. The consequence of the tab being picked up by the government is a surge in government expenditure. Considering a government’s ultimate source of revenue for its expenses is invariably taxation, free education can therefore be only sustained under a regime of constantly-increasing taxes. The tragedy of this situation becomes more apparent when the misguided application of the taxes for purported educational programs and the negative impacts of the high taxes begin to take a toll on the general economic performance of the country.

Another lamentable consequence of free education is that when the government assumes the financial burden for education, it also often arrogates to itself the moral authority to dictate the terms under which such education is provided. Such dictated terms span excessive government influence in curricula development and intrusion into school management to the conscription of graduates after school under the guise of mandatory national service.

Private savings and capital formation are also hampered by the tax burden inflicted on society by the huge financial demands of government funding of free education. This crowds out private entrepreneurs from providing mostly superior educational services. It therefore leaves the country’s educational sector uncompetitive and uninnovvative with players hardly able to churn out top-class and highly competitive products.

It is the desire to help our friends in the Rainbow Nation to avoid this unpleasant fate that informs the advice that they do not legislate university education to be provided free of charge.