The Unfinished Business of Fees Must Fall: Challenges in South Africa’s Higher Education System
Sethuthuthu Lucky Vuma 
& Nkuna Karabo Miranda
Issue: Vol.6 No.14 Article 4 pp.3793 – 3809
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561429 | Published online 30th December, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: #FeesMustFall, Higher Education, Transformation, Challenges, Unfinished, Unequal
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Sethuthuthu Lucky Vuma is a holder of a Doctor of Philosophy in History from the University of Limpopo. He is currently working at the University of Limpopo as a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, School of Social Sciences, Department of Cultural and Political Studies. His field of research interest is Liberation History, Student Activism, Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS), and South African Historiography. He published a number of journal articles in accredited journals and also presented a number of papers in academic conferences. He produced and continues to supervise honours, master’s and PHD students at the University of Limpopo. He is also an external examiner for the University of Venda, University of Zululand, University of South Africa and Walter Sisulu University. He is a provincial Chairperson of the Oral History Association of South Africa (OHASA), Limpopo Chapter and Deputy Chairperson for Limpopo Archives Council (LAC). He is also a former chairperson of Sports in the SRC at the University of Limpopo. He spends most of his time analysing the politics of the world, keeping updated with current affairs and researching new developments in the field of his research interest. Being born and living his life in Limpopo province, South Africa, instilled in him a respect for diversity and a burning desire to be a well-grounded academic. This goal has been his main reason for his stay in academia, and he is determined to work hard in order to achieve this goal.
Karabo Miranda Nkuna is an emerging scholar from Phalaborwa, Limpopo. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Limpopo, where she is currently pursuing an Honours in History. Her research is grounded in decolonial critique, African feminist thought, and a commitment to challenging dominant historical narratives. She is concerned with the rewriting and reinterpretation of the histories that African women have been excluded from, and she argues that there are gendered silences and a selective amnesia in the liberation struggle and in the historiography of South Africa as a whole. She is interested in the political aspect of religion, focusing on how religion was, and still is, used tool for psychological colonisation, and continues to perpetuate a sense of inferiority. One of the main themes of her work is the critique of the South African education system and the hierarchy of language, where English and Afrikaans are privileged at the expense of indigenous South African languages. She criticises institutions claiming to be Afrocentric, while privileging Eurocentric theories and inscribing African scholarship at the margins, if at all. Restorative scholarship, as she calls it, seeks to address the imbalance that exists in the historical narrative by restoring African agency, confronting the legacies of distortion embedded in narratives to provide a truly decolonial paradigm of scholarship.
Vuma, Sethuthuthu Lucky, and Nkuna Karabo Miranda.“The Unfinished Business of Fees Must Fall: Challenges in South Africa’s Higher Education System.” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 6, no. 14 (2025): 3793 – 3809, https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.202561429.
© 2025 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
