The student movement and society must turn their backs on protests which result in damage to property‚ newly-inaugurated University of South Africa (Unisa) chancellor Thabo Mbeki said.

In his maiden address as chancellor of the university in Pretoria on Monday‚ the former president outlinined his vision in line with the university’s vision to become the “African university shaping futures in the service of humanity”.

Universities have faced protests from students demanding free education. These protests have resulted in damage to campuses over the past year.

Mbeki expressed the appreciation and understanding of the actions taken by students in the “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees Must Fall” campaigns.

However Mbeki said he did not approve of the completely unnecessary and counterproductive violence and destruction of university property which occurred during these campaigns.

“Needless to say‚ the student movement and our society as a whole must decisively turn their backs on the forms of protests rooted in the logic of cutting of one’s nose to spite one’s face.”

Mbeki said this was illustrated by a plethora of incidents in which people burnt down clinics to demand better health care‚ or destroyed lecture rooms because they wanted free education‚ or laid whole schools to ruin because they did not like a proposed municipal boundary.

Mbeki said the answer to the question on whether the country was spending sufficient resources on higher education should be deferred until the commission of inquiry into the feasibility of higher education finished its work.

The commission‚ headed by Judge Jonathan Heher‚ is inquiring into and will make recommendations on the feasibility of a fee-free higher education and training in South Africa.

“I trust that the report of the commission will also alert us to the imperative to engage the whole nation in a serious discussion about the larger challenge of how we should structure our public expenditures‚ over the medium term at least.”

Mbeki said this arose from the hard reality that the country continued to face challenges to correcting injustices of the past.

“The state has finite resources. What is spent to address one social economic challenge constitutes a resource which is unavailable to address another challenge‚” Mbeki said.