By Yusuf Cassim
When a parent puts their child on a bus and sends them to university, they are making an enormous leap of faith.
They are trusting the university, but they are also trusting a much bigger system: the residence, the municipality, law enforcement, transport providers, accommodation operators and government.
That trust comes with a heavy responsibility. Our responsibility cannot simply be to draft policies, hold meetings or receive reports. When a system is failing, our responsibility is to change it.
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This is why we must rethink how we understand student safety in South Africa.
A student does not stop being a student when they leave the campus gate. They remain a student when they walk to their residence, wait for a taxi, cross a municipal road, visit a shop or return home at night. No one can have freedom if they live in fear and the campus gate cannot become the boundary of our responsibility.
Beyond the campus gate
The tragic murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana made this painfully clear. Her story is a stark reminder that the route between where a student lives and where they study is just as critical to their safety as what happens inside the lecture hall.
Nearly seven years later, remembrance remains important, but remembrance must ultimately drive action. The question we should ask is not simply whether we remember Uyinene, but whether we have actually changed anything. That requires moving beyond a culture of responding to incidents after they happen and toward a culture of prevention.
Governance driven by outcomes, not labels
It also requires government to work differently. Serving as a Democratic Alliance deputy minister in a Government of National Unity, I recognise that South Africa’s political traditions do not always agree on how government should operate. That diversity is part of our governing reality.
However, higher education is precisely where we should be judged less by the labels we carry and more by the outcomes we deliver.
For me, that demands a practical approach: go where the problem is, listen to the people experiencing it, bring the relevant institutions together and ask whether the intervention actually works.
I have applied that principle when responding to severe student accommodation and funding challenges. At Western TVET College, more than 60 students were displaced. At the Central University of Technology’s Welkom Campus, 1392 students faced accommodation allowance crises and the immediate prospect of eviction. These are not abstract policy debates; they determine whether a student has somewhere safe to sleep and whether they can continue their education.
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Safety requires that same ground-level intervention.
We can install cameras, deploy drones, improve street lighting and leverage technology to track risks. These tools matter, but technology alone will never keep a student safe. We need eyes in the sky, but we also need eyes on the ground. We need responsive teams when a risk is identified and clear channels to ensure help reaches the student in time.
Breaking institutional silos
Most importantly, we must stop managing student safety in institutional silos.
A university understands its students. A municipality understands its streets. The South African Police Service understands crime patterns. Accommodation providers understand residences. Private security understands immediate physical surroundings. Student leaders understand the lived reality.
Students themselves know where the risks are. They know which pathways feel unsafe, which residences have broken gates, where harassment occurs and which reporting mechanisms work versus those that exist only on paper. That knowledge is an essential asset.
Students should not be consulted only after decisions are finalised or after a tragedy occurs. They must be active partners in identifying risks, shaping interventions, and assessing results.
A compact for action                                     Â
This is why South Africa needs a practical national student safety compact.
This cannot be another empty declaration that disappears after a summit. It must be an operational framework with defined, measurable responsibilities for universities, municipalities, law enforcement, accommodation providers and student leadership, backed by a mechanism for reporting progress publicly. If sector leaders gather again next year, success should not be measured by the speeches made, but by what actually changed on the ground.
This is where the principle of #NoStudentLeftBehind becomes tangible. A student struggling with funding is not just a funding case. A student facing eviction is not just an accommodation case. A student walking through an unsafe neighbourhood is not just a policing case. Students are human beings whose safety and success depend on the whole system working together.
Their lives do not fit into tidy departmental or municipal jurisdictions. While our administrative systems divide their problems into separate buckets, the student experiences them as a single reality. The ultimate test of our work is straightforward:
- Is the student safer?
- Can a young woman leave her residence for a lecture and return unharmed?
- Can a parent in Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, the Free State, the North West or the Western Cape send their child to university confident that everything reasonably possible is being done to keep them safe?
For a country navigating a Government of National Unity, this is an area where the politics must remain simple. Different parties bring different philosophies to the table, but when a student leaves home in pursuit of knowledge and opportunity, they should not need to know which party governs which municipality or which agency owns which piece of the problem. They should simply know that the system around them will protect them.
Student safety is not a party-political issue. It is a fundamental test of whether government can put the student at the centre and cross institutional boundaries to deliver.
That is not an ambition; it is the minimum we owe them.
Yusuf Cassim is the Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training.
