The Voice: Black students must boycott NUS

Following on from OBV’s coverage last week of the barring of Black students from a NUS conference an editorial in The Voice, Britain's leading Black newspaper, has called on Black students to leave the NUS and set up their own independent student body.

"The decision by the current National Union of Students (NUS) president Aaron Porter to ban black students from staging their own tuition fees protest is a colossal diss to black students past, present and future. It shows an ignorance of the fact that it is black students who will be hardest hit by this government's fees increase and the lack of suitable jobs after graduation. It is also an insult to 50 years of black student action that has led the way in undergraduate activism.

In the eighties we brought about the college boycott of Barclays which played a part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa. Black students in Salford forced books like Victor Headley's Yardie on their reading list. And we have raised millions for victims of devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and drought in Africa. At my own university an enterprising Nigerian by the name of Sam Egwu started the organisation CHOICE (Children of the Inner City Education Fund) to encourage black teenagers to go to university. Thousands of black graduates owe their degree to him.

The National Union of Students were always quick to claim our successes as their own after the fact. But I was there and I know who started what. That's why I'm calling on the Black Students’ Campaign to stick two fingers up at the NUS and break away to form their own student body, because the NUS can't be trusted to fight for college places and jobs for OUR youths."

Read the full piece here.