As you are aware, we had another challenging day with those DUT students and non-students who decided to continue with their protest actions today. Lectures in most departments continued for a period in the morning, until it became unsafe for our staff and students.

Let me say that there was a tremendous amount of panic and even paranoia amongst staff and students and understandably so, with the publishing of some rather unsavoury Facebook postings which represented hate speech. These and any other comments and posts that promoted hate speech and incited violence will be taken up with the South African Human Rights Commission.

We have made progress in trying to understand the challenges of our students who are having concerns with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme and we are in communication with them. By tomorrow (28 February 2014), we will be able to take some decisive steps in that direction.

The University will be open for academic activities tomorrow (28 February 2014). I am aware that there are very real risks associated with this but we have taken further steps to strengthen our security measures for tomorrow.

We cannot afford as an institution to shut down. Even though the student protestors will try to test the strength of the court interdict and force us to close, the University staff and I are fully committed to being at our workstations and progressing with our academic programme. We are working very hard on keeping the academic programme on track and to maintain our capacity to end this semester on the basis that you will still receive a good education.

I thank you for your patience, commitment and support that you have so consistently given our University.

I look forward to a successful day tomorrow, Friday 28 February.

Yours sincerely,

Prof Ahmed Bawa
Vice-Chancellor and Principal
Durban University of Technology