WATCH: #FeesMustFall students march outside Parliament
University students from across the Western Cape marched to Parliament to reiterate their call for free tertiary education.
|||Cape Town - A large crowd of students had gathered outside Parliament in Cape Town on Wednesday amid tight security ahead of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS).
A helicopted buzzed overhead and police had set up a strong line of defence outside Parliament in a bid to avoid a repeat of the chaotic scenes from a year ago when during then finance minister Nhlanhla Nene’s speech, protesting students entered the Parliamentary precinct and fought running battles with riot police.
Thousands of students had by lunchtime descended on the Cape Town CBD in the vicinity of Parliament.
Earlier, Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane, had told the party’s supporters that they had chosen the day to stage a protest at parliament as “student issues are money issues and Pravin Gordhan needs to hear us today”.
Maimane told a large crowd that his mother was a cashier and it was the finance minister’s duty to make sure that the child of a domestic worker could become a doctor or a lawyer.
Maimane said the ruling African National Congress did “not understand and they can’t come up with a solution”.
However, he called on protesting students not to resort to violence, saying: “Fellow South Africans, it is not right to burn our universities and public properties. Instead of adding universities, we have to rebuild it and it disturbs everybody.”
IOL MOJO and African News Agency