By: Siphiwe Ngcongco
The Sol Plaatje University (SPU) and the Students Representative Council (SRC) have agreed to find accommodation for registered students and to a new start date for the academic year.
This agreement follows student protests at the SPU’s central campus last week related to dissatisfaction with the lack of accommodation, food and academic exemptions.
While the institution’s management and the student leaders were in talks, there was a temporary halt to academic classe to reached an agreement.
Qondakele Sompondo, Institutional Advancement director, said classes had officially commenced, although they were still battling some minor issues and might be addressed before Thursday, 23 February.
“We are satisfied with the progress as academic classes started on Monday, 20 February, although there were some issues regarding student exclusion academically as well as financial debt”, he said,
“We met with landlords and discovered that there were still some issues of 180 students in accredited off-campus accommodation to be catered for. There are some inquiries and we were expecting about 200 more first-year students whose accommodations was reserved on campus”.
Sompondo said the food issue is solved following a change to the system. “At the beginning of the year, it was free for all and fights for food started when the management system had to activate food cards. Some of the food cards were in-active as a result, they declined at the cafeteria tills. Everything is working”.
A third-year student at SPU who declined to be identified said the institution’s management needed to improve their systems before the academic year started to avoid unnecessary student strikes.
There was no response from the SRC before going to print.
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