By Our Foreign Desk

STUDENTS blocked roads and entrances and caused classes to be suspended at a number of top universities yesterday in protest at planned tuition fee rises.

The demonstrators, including medical students with stethoscopes around their necks, are angry about planned increases in tuition fees.

The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg announced that it had suspended a proposed rise of 10.5 per cent until next year after several days of protests and that talks on the fees will start again.

The university widely known as Wits said that it recognised the burden of higher education costs on students and their families, citing a decline in state subsidies and high increases in the cost of infrastructure and utilities, as well as the depreciation of the rand.

Wits said that it would consider austerity measures and other ways to ease financial pressure on students.

Students who cannot afford increased fees staged similar protests at the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch ­University and Rhodes University.

The South African Communist Party (SACP) in the ­Western Cape backed the ­protests, accusing universities of prioritising sky-high fee increases to exclude students from working-class and poor families rather than expand access for them.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions also supported the students, calling the fee increases “excessive and unaffordable in the current economic climate.

“We are fully behind the call for a free education as promised by the Freedom Charter.

“This commodification of education will continue to keep working-class children at the bottom end of the economic pyramid.”