By Die Matie Main Editorial 2025/2026
Die Matie’s Main Editorial has had its ears pricked and eyes open wide on campus for the past year and these are the issues you, as a student, should be caring about.
12,4%
This is the voter turnout for the 2026 Students’ Representative Council (SRC) election, as announced on 31 July.
“The right to vote is too precious, and has been won with too much sacrifice, for us to let it wither because our people have failed to put themselves on the voter roll,” said former president Nelson Mandela in 1999.
While Die Matie supports the incoming SRC and their future endeavours, we cannot regard them as representative of the student body. 12,4% – 4 153 out of 33 497 – is alarmingly low, embarrassing and a failed attempt at democracy.
This last year leading up to the election, Student Parliament arranged a plenary sitting each term, the Student Electoral Commission ran successful campaigning and caucuses and Die Matie reported consistently on student opinions and discussions.
This was a significant increase in opportunities for visibility and engagement in contrast to previous years. Yet, students simply did not attend and engage with these democratic processes and simply did not vote.
This is not the only way our student democracy is failing. Those that do actually care enough to join plenary sittings and caucuses are quite obviously more interested in the theatrics than the actual issues at hand. Often ill-informed, ignorant and motivated by personal narratives, these sessions are far from constructive.
The social media that results from these sessions demonstrates this clearly. Honestly, it is no wonder most students do not see the point in attending. When Die Matie reporters do not engage in false allegations in the sittings, they are told, “You should have just argued back,” and, “You could have made it onto the reel.”
The true victims of this are not those behind the podium nor in the audience. They are often not in the room at all. We have real and serious systemic failures in our country and institution. We cannot afford to waste time treating these discussions as a political breeding ground. We need to do what higher education is supposed to teach us – think critically, engage constructively and actually create significant change.
R1 120 882 290
This was the amount owed to Stellenbosch University (SU) in student debt at the end of 2025, as announced at a meeting with the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education on 29 April.
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) was responsible for R454 million (or 40%) of this amount.
Students are asking about the NSFAS allowance amounts for 2027, when SU does not have the amounts for 2026 yet. NSFAS is refusing to respond to queries from SU, students or Die Matie and its future is very much uncertain.
In the portfolio committee meet-ing, NSFAS officials were late, unprepared and could not even distinguish between a million or a billion when discussing how much was owed to SU.
The impact is students without funding who are scared and entirely left in the dark. While some students participate in eating com-petitions in the Neelsie and spend R1 000 on a house dance ticket, others go days without food or a safe place to sleep.
With little to no communi-cation, uncertainty is taking over the students and staff of SU. What happens when SU is unable to carry the debt when it needs to keep paying lecturers and provide resources for stu-dies? For how much longer can they keep doing this?
580 MW
That is how much electricity four new data centres, planned for Cape Town, will collectively require to run for a year. It equates to just over 34% of the City of Cape Town’s current maximum electricity demand of 1676 MW.
Take a minute for that to sink in.
These figures were reported by Daily Maverick on 28 April 2026.
Four buildings, 580MW, more than a third of the city’s current maximum electricity demand.
This number is sickening.
Cape Town is a city that has spent years being told to conserve. We have been asked to limit our electricity use, save water, adapt our lifestyles and accept that our resources are finite.
Yet, at the same time, we are forced to welcome four enormous facilities whose operations will require a third of what the entire city of Cape Town currently uses at maximum demand.
And for what?
So that we can store more data, run more prompts and make our increasingly digital lives more convenient and effortless?
The irony is difficult to ignore. Our generation cannot type an email without asking ChatGPT to write it for us, while the Boomer generation cannot resist the urge to animate themselves as their pets. Somewhere along the way, our demand for digital convenience has begun to outpace our willingness to understand what it will cost us.
Die Matie is not against tech-nology or development. We are fully aware that our country needs investment, jobs and economic growth. But relentless growth without scrutiny is not progress.
The same city that asks residents to think carefully about every milliliter of water and every kilowatt-hour cannot af-ford to disguise industrial-scale consumption as growth. This is not the time to ignore the real life implications and effects.The question is not whether Cape Town can accommodate these data centres.
We should rather ask whether we should be willing to give them more than a third of our current maximum electricity demand – and what, exactly, are we prepared to give up, in order to make room for them?
Die Matie’s 85th birthday has provided us with the privilege of interacting with the past while having to reaffirm our relevance. We have retraced headlines and seen history in the making, and we will keep telling the stories and keeping the score. You can count on that.
