INSTITUTIONAL STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL (ISRC) MEDIA STATEMENT ON THE SITUATION AT WALTER SISULU UNIVERSITY NMD SITE (15/09/10

As the Institutional Student Representative Council (ISRC) of Walter Sisulu university, we would like to take this opportunity to respond to the slanderous lies projected as the view of the entire student body and clarify the issues and statements that have been presented to the public by a group of individuals who claim to be our sub structure posing them selves as the Nelson Mandela Drive Site student leadership.
The recent violent and criminal occurrences that have continued to exist at the Nelson Mandela Drive Site which have resulted to the closure and reopening of that particular site, have further resulted to a continued disruption of the core business of the university, is an unfortunate, opportunistic and disappointing tendency that is aimed at rendering the University ungovernable and project it as unstable. Walter Sisulu University is an institution named after a man of excellence, integrity and wisdom, who vowed to suffer under the system until he defeated it. It is our considered view that the guiding principles and values of our merged institution are premised on these sacrosanct and instructive values of this giant of our people. Having said the above, we wish to put on record the following:

• WSU Student leadership is not a body to be used for personal ambitions driven by subsidiary emergent predatory elite which are inside and outside the university. Amongst other duties our jurisdiction remains that of sound student interest towards the total transformation of our university. The call for the university vice chancellor to step down is a view of not even 3% of the population of our constituency .we the fore want to distance our selves from a process that undermines the legitimate voice of students in other Campuses and democratically elected governing structures .we further want to re affirm our support for the VC in fast tracking the process of re accreditation of the Bcom accounting program at WSU by the South African Institute for Charter Accountants. As we speak SAICA is at the University as part of this effort.

• The commitment of being resource conscious by utilizing the university’s resources prudently and responsibly is an important value to us in making it a point that we safeguard the little facilities and resources that we have with the view of adding maximum value to our institution. We fully support concrete and sound student issues that are procedurally raised by recognized sub structure of the ISRC .We therefore wish to strongly condemn the criminal and violent acts that have manifested at NMD in the past two weeks. Burning of vehicles, facilities and vandalism is an act contrary to act 108 of 1996, standard university statute, university policies and the SRC constitution .Therefore as the ISRC in a developing African university we wish to state it clearly that WSU has no space for criminals who masquerade as students. Those responsible for this mess must be called to book.

• It is regrettable that there has been innocent students that have been arrested ,having been used by this populist syndicate ,which in turn is now enjoying itself, proud of their feat to temporarily evade law enforcement for their criminal actions. We pledge to do all that is within our power to ensure that these students are not incarcerated but rather the criminal elements that were key to the chaos are. As the legitimate and the elected student leadership we state once more that this behavior is not a reflection of the view of students in the university but rather an orchestrated criminal action by a group seeking attention and opportunity to lay their greedy hands on institutions of power without democratic process.

• On the academic exclusion policy popularly known as the G8.we want to make it clear that having consulted all our campus structures we have welcomed the resolution that the policy exist but in terms of implementation, the are yet to be discussions at the level of SENATE for the review of the roll-out in 2011.We are therefore busy preparing our submission to Senate in this regard.

We also wish to state it clearly that if there is any issue of principle that we are committed to ensuring that it is not compromised at any point, it is the voicing out of the correct student views at WSU.

For more information contact
Andile Majeke
ISRC President
0835601591
0729540040
or
Sabelo Dlamini
ISRC Secretary General
0833792167
Yours in Responsible Student Leadership