Student protesters endanger the ill

A rampage by university students yesterday jeopardised the lives of patients at George Mukhari Hospital in Ga-Rankuwa, north of Pretoria.

About 500 students burned the access control building of the University of Limpopo's Medunsa campus and two university vehicles, and blocked all access to the campus, which houses the hospital's laboratories.

A pathology professor said: "I have to access the laboratory to analyse critical patients' tissue samples for diagnosis. A doctor cannot treat without a diagnosis and it is like signing patients' death sentences if I do not process these samples."

The professor and other staff members climbed over the university's steel fence to escape the grounds as students hurled stones.

He said cancer patients were the most at risk as delays in diagnoses could mean tumours would grow into an untreatable state.

"If patients die, I am morally and ethically liable. In the morning I negotiated my way in but I had to come out as the students grew more aggressive," he said.

The students, who are demanding the resignation of the head of the medical school and the university registrar, started their protest on Friday by burning a university pick-up truck.

The protest follows 13 medical students, out of a class of about 250, failing their final-year examinations. The protesters claim marking irregularities led to the failures.

One of the students apparently took his paper to another institution to be marked a second time and passed.

Warrant Officer Mathews Nkoadi said the police could monitor the situation only from outside as "management prevented police from entering the premises".

University spokesman Kgalema Mohuba could not be reached for comment.

• Thousands of pupils from Ekurhuleni, Soweto, Midvaal and other parts of Gauteng looted shops in the Johannesburg city centre yesterday, ostensibly to protest the lack of quality education.

It is not known how the protest was orchestrated, or by whom.

Police were forced to block roads as gangs of youths harassed passers-by and looted shops for nappies, beer and sweets.

Some pupils marched to the Gauteng legislature, while others proceeded to the Gauteng department of education.Penwell Dlamini