Mukoni T Ratshitanga
The Minister of Education, Sibusiso Bengu, has severely chastised University of Zululand rector Charles Dlamini for his “unfortunate insinuations” that the ministry is “worse than the worst of apartheid ministries” in running higher education.
Bengu said this week: “Professor Dlamini has a right to glorify apartheid if he wants to. He also has a right to mourn the good old days of the apartheid masters who ran universities better than the democratically elected nonracial government.”
The war of words between the minister and the rector erupted in an exchange of statements through the Mail & Guardian.
It began with an angry letter from Dlamini to the M&G, complaining about a report last week that gave details of a probe last year into payments by the university to an individual that were “outside the scope of normal business practice”.
The report also quoted Itumeleng Mosala, the ministry’s tertiary education director, as saying that Dlamini “has closed the door to us”.
In his letter this week, Dlamini said Mosala’s statement was “balderdash”, adding: “To say … that I have closed doors … is not only irresponsible but is mischievous.”
Dlamini said he objected to members of his university’s Broad Transformation Forum discussing certain issues with Bengu before doing so with the university council or management. “The [forum] is a committee of the council and not a committee of the minister,” Dlamini said.
What Bengu was doing was to “undermine the management of and discipline at the university”.
Dlamini said the ministry “pays lip service” to institutional autonomy in the White Paper on Higher Education. He said Bengu, instead of sending the transformation forum back to him, had “purported” to send a delegation to “interrogate me”.
Bengu, asked for his reaction, said he had a right to meet the forum: “My ministry is answerable to the public, and must be accessible to that public.”
He said the forum had told him they had “absolutely no recourse in the management and council structures”. His job was to listen to them, he said. “There is no law, not even the apartheid one that Professor Dlamini glorifies so much, that says I will only listen to appeals that have been permitted by council to be made to me.”
Bengu said he met stakeholders “in order to inform ourselves about the situation”. If Dlamini took it for interference, “then I am glad I am interfering because I become better informed as a result … and able to perform my public duty to ensure that I account to the public whose funds maintain these institutions.”
In his letter, Dlamini denied charges in the M&G report that the Kagiso Trust had not received audited statements from 1991 for funds it had sent to the university. Dlamini said statements were sent, sometimes “by hand”. He did not know why “they did not write to me as they did in the past when they had problems. Their claim … is false and malicious.”