Abstract:
The paper examines the state’s response to students’
claim for free education that has rocked South African
tertiary institutions since 2015. These responses
have been characterised by the enforcement of a
de facto state of emergency materialised by an extreme
securitisation/militarisation of campuses and other
public spaces, resulting in human/student rights and
the rule of law being brought to a standstill. The paper
further discusses the background to the #FeesMustFall
protest and attempts to understand why the crisis was
addressed only more than two years after it erupted.
The article proceeds by looking into the aftermath of the
fees must fall campaign characterised by an escalation
of security mechanisms which succeeded in turning the
campuses into camps where fact and law are merged
into one another and where a state of emergency has lost
its exceptional character and became the new normal.
