A MAN, trapped on roof during a flood, prays to God. “Save me,” he pleads. Moments later, his wife, trapped with him, says, “A boat! We are saved!” The man says, “I have faith, take the boat, God will save me.” The water rises. A rescue team passes by. “Come,” they say, “swim to us.” The man responds, “Help others, I have faith, God will save me.” The water rises. In time, a helicopter descends. “Take the ladder,” the pilot pleads. “No,” says the man, “I have faith, God will save me.” The water rises and consumes the man. In heaven, facing the Almighty, he complains, “Lord, I prayed, I believed, I had faith, yet you abandoned me.” God, replies, “Not true, I sent you a boat, a rescue team and a helicopter.”

Watching the media over the past two weeks has been an interesting exercise. To an overwhelming degree its representatives unconditionally aligned themselves with students, as they rose up across the country.

The protests were romanticised and defended in equal measure as platform after platform united behind the drive to eradicate university fees entirely; at the very least to abolish any increase next year. “Victory,” was the cry, disseminated instantaneously in a thousand tweets, as President Jacob Zuma yielded to pressure on Friday and, in that now weary, emotionless, staccato manner with which he has become synonymous, announced all increases would be permanently suspended.

Everyone was a winner.

Perhaps some were projecting their own guilt at having made their way through a system they seem to now regard as fundamentally unfair, without ever once raising their voices. Now they had an opportunity to live vicariously through the adventures of this generation. When some students turned to violence and destruction — admittedly there was relatively little of it given the scale of the protests — it was the media that tried to create some kind of pure and unsullied ideal. It was those aligned with a political party who were responsible, they said, “certain elements” or “agent provocateurs”.

As if students don’t come in all shapes and colours.

Students themselves were relatively slow to focus on the people who actually hold the purse strings. Initially, replicating the unthinking repertoire the Rhodes Must Fall movement had helped foster — that “the administration” is the embodiment of all evil — it took the Democratic Alliance and the creation of the hash tag #BladeMustFall to shift the emphasis onto the executive. That said, when they did eventually lock onto the right target, government hasn’t experienced that kind of pressure in decades. It took less than a week to force it to eat out of the students’ hands. Impressive stuff.

In the wake of it all, we are left with a higher education sector unable to properly fund its expenses and, without any additional income, forced to make cuts.

Quite what is to be cut by universities is yet to be seen. The shortfall is estimated anywhere between R3bn and R4bn, depending on who you talk to and the Higher Education Department, if weekend reports are anything to go by, is damned if it knows where the money is coming from. Certainly the Treasury seems to be scratching its head.

The eagerness with which a number of vice-chancellors worked together with government to reach a resolution suggested the nature of their own autonomy was lost on them. Only a university council can ratify any changes to fees. It cannot be unilaterally determined by a vice-chancellor. Whatever these internal misunderstandings, government seems to have a much clearer understanding of university autonomy, and it is not a favourable one.

At one point, the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League suggested a law be passed to deal with university autonomy, and Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande wasted no time expressing himself on that issue. “Yes, institutional autonomy has been abused in South Africa by some of the universities. For instance, in some instances, they used institutional autonomy to prevent transformation, so there is a concern about that issue,” he told the Sunday Times.

These sorts of overtones have been around for a while now. Last year Zuma suggested universities should focus on producing “patriotic citizens” and align their behaviour with the transformation agenda. Nzimande’s transformation committee has been fleshing out the details in the backrooms of the department for years.

Its chairperson, William Makgoba (who almost single-handedly reduced the University of KwaZulu-Natal to a chaotic mess, notching up a deficit of some R1.9bn in the process), had the gall to suggest that, “we have 26 universities and I can only count one person in the whole system who is actually competent and (I think) fit to be a vice-chancellor in South Africa”.

Someone should ask the minister what he makes of that assessment. Either way, in his committee he clearly has created a helpful stick with which to beat universities over the head.

That is, of course, were the minister able to do anything effectively. Blade Nzimande is a communist who drives a luxury German car, holds office despite representing a party that has never stood in an election and has overseen a funding crisis in universities that has now been brought to fruition on his watch, while he messes around with social engineering. He, like so many ANC ministers, can’t tell the wood from the trees.

Here is an interesting question: Are our universities better or worse off after the #feesmustfall protests?

And then there was the performance of the country’s political parties. What an embarrassing mess that was. The ANC, which now seems to have detached entirely from reality, actually supported and encouraged, no, handed out T-shirts to, protesting students. If you thought its Soweto march against Eskom was bizarre, its response to the students would find pride of place in the pages of Animal Farm.

DA leader Mmusi Maimane tried valiantly to demonstrate this was something he genuinely cared about, but the fact that it palpably was not left much of what he had to say ringing hollow.

The DA was very quick to flag with the public a speech its higher education deputy spokesperson had made warning of the looming crisis some time ago. What it doesn’t seem to get is that this is an indictment of it, not the ANC. If it had so presciently identified the crisis, why has it not campaigned on it all this time? Why has it never put that formidable campaigning machine to work on fees, in the same way, say, it has pursued the SABC CEO? What that speech demonstrates is the DA’s leadership couldn’t spot a looming crisis if it was mapped out in black and white, which it was.

The DA’s higher education policy, presumably soon to be replaced by a new Vision 2029 version, promises free higher education for all. The economic nuts and bolts of that particular proposal will make for interesting reading.

The EFF was, as ever, at its opportunistic best. And, as ever, its contribution boiled down to berating Blade Nzimande as it relished the spontaneous uprising. Its credentials on this front are more authentic than the DA’s so, although it too had moments when students turned on it for its seemingly instantaneous compassion, it was able to play the popular politics game a little better. Nevertheless, its opportunism likewise left a bad taste in the mouth.

The same could be said of the media. Over the past decade it has shown precious little interest in the plight of universities or students. It, too, suddenly found its voice. No introspection into how it also missed this looming crisis. The media behaved like it had always been there, on the side of the weak and marginalised, deeply concerned about the issues that mattered most to them. If the media wasn’t so helpful to the students’ cause, you would forgive students for chasing them away as they did the DA and EFF. Their opportunism was no less gratuitous.

But here’s the thing: for all of this, the real problem seems to have been missed by everyone. University fees are not some isolated phenomenon. It is part of the far bigger, much more commonplace and fundamentally threatening structural problem: the condition of our economy.

There simply isn’t enough money to go around. Years of poor growth, increased lending and a series of infrastructure crises that have sucked the fiscus dry, have left us teetering on the edge of the abyss. In the other direction, a public sector wage bill that has now seen our contingency reserves raided, continues to outstrip inflation at an alarming rate.

Universities and their condition are just another symptom of this environment and what these protests have revealed is that every element of the problem — from the administration, to the executive, to our political parties, to the media itself — are absolutely and fundamentally drowning in a crisis no one saw coming, as they all try desperately to pretend it is something they have always cared deeply about. It is the consequence of a certain kind of economic illiteracy, an obsession with corruption and an ability to respond to problems only when they become acute.

The irony is that the economy, the greatest crisis of them all, is not given any proper attention.

GroundUp carried an interesting and important story on October 20 in the midst of the protests. “Protesters occupied Shoprite in Khayelitsha Mall this morning demanding a reduction in the price of bread,” it wrote. “The Shoprite store was closed this morning during the occupation. An eye witness told GroundUp that the protesters were eventually escorted out of the store. Private security guards in bullet proof vests carrying rifles patrolled the area. The protesters came together under the social media hash tag #ThePriceOfBreadMustFall. They have expressed solidarity with protesters demanding lower university fees who are using the hash tag #FeesMustFall.”

But it is their subsequent analysis of the problem that is most telling. In a piece trying to explain why these protests mattered, Jane Battersby-Lennard wrote, “We are witnessing two neglected constitutional rights being rendered visible: the right to higher education and the right to food.”

The problem is not rights. The fact that they are being violated is a symptom. The problem is the money – there is none. The business that is South Africa makes no profit, but it spends and spends and spends. And if you think student protests about fees are disturbing in their intensity, if food protests start to take off in a significant way, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The past few years have been marked by a series of mini revolutions in South Africa — service delivery protests, wage negotiations, student fees. Really it is only apartheid geographic spacial planning and the lack of a single South African Tahir Square that seems to stop them all from coming together. But they are all symptoms. We remain, for the most part, blind to the real revolution.

The economy is the golden thread that joins them all together. If the problem is not arrested and the situation addressed, you get the sense it will arrive on our doorsteps to shock and disbelief.

This article first appeared in Business Day