Open Access and Feesmustfall : A Critical Discourse Analysis of the University Students Protest in South Africa

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore from a critical discourse analysis point of view the 2015 and 2016 university students' protest, tagged "#FEESMUSTFALL" against the public universities proposed increase in fees by between six and ten per cent in South Africa. The paper proceeds from the assumption that the seeming difficult on the part of the South African government to meet its commitment to provide open access to university education through different financial initiatives might have provoked internal conversations leading to a subtle violence of the kind that equates social movements. Based on digital qualitative research approach, we adopted a critical discourse analysis which culminated in our conclusion that students' resistance to the attrition and contrivance of open access to university education probably occasioned by rising financial cost of university education could open up new visages of debates around the success or otherwise of democratically elected governments to equitably address the peoples' expectations. The kind of resistance observed in the "#FEESMUSTFALL" university students protest in South Africa can and does actually take the form of an ontological stratified measure of reality ending up as a process that puts the political process to test.