Benny Malatji: RIGHT TO REPLY
I find it annoying to read every week about your paper’s distortions of the situation on the campus of the University of the North, Turfloop.
I refer here to a string of Andy Duffy’s articles (“Student council turns Turfloop turmoil into profit”, May 29 to June 4; “SRC blows R1,3m on cars, catering and clothes”, June 5 to 11; “Student victory at Turfloop”, June 12 to 18).
A few examples: it is a lie that Professor Sevit Mashego has been sacked as the acting principal; he never held that position. Mashego is the deputy principal: teaching and research, and has chosen to contest for the position of vice-chancellor.
The reason why Mashego cannot be the acting principal is because it is inconceivable that a candidate can be both the player and the referee at the same time. Mashego remains the deputy principal as we speak.
Since I have indicated that the part on Mashego is far from the truth, it will also be necessary to say that the Broad Transformation Committee (BTC)did not replace him with a lecturer.
It is the university council which took the decision to have Professor Mashike (not a lecturer, Duffy!), who was once a dean of the faculty of arts, to be the acting principal until Ndebele’s successor is found.
Duffy should know by now that the senate is not the highest decision-making body at universities; even the Act on higher education says that. All employees of the university are employed by the council, including the vice-chancellor/principal and his deputy.
It is the responsibility of the council to look for suitable candidates to fill the vacancy of principal. The senate was not surprised. The only people who should be surprised are Duffy’s “reliable sources”.
It is wrong that students have asked that they should stand as faculty heads or deans of faculty. It’s the first time we at the university hear this from Duffy.
Such exaggeration can only come from a person who is used by sources within the management who want to safeguard their loot, or who, because of lack of academic credentials, turn to misread all issues raised by students for obvious reasons – that these individuals were never there to serve but to milk money from the institution.
Students and staff have asked that the process of election of deans of faculties should be transparent and that, until a final document outlining such procedure is drawn up, the university will use the ad hoc procedure it used when deans were elected in 1992.
Whoever told Duffy that positions of faculty heads “are generally reserved for senior academics” obviously did not understand the process that evolved in Turfloop. The procedure is that all academics, except temporary and part-time staff, are eligible to stand for election as faculty deans.
But such procedure was not followed in 1997. Instead, Duffy’s holy senate vetoed some of the candidates who were elected because of lousy reasons. I say lousy because it was only 14 months ago that the senate rejected J Mashamaite for the position of deputy dean, but have since asked him to step in as acting dean of the faculty of arts. So much for respected senior academics.
Some of the cases were even taken to the Committee for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) which ruled in the candidate’s favour. As always, the university management did not accept the CCMA ruling, but chose to contest the decision in court.
Until a month ago, the faculty of arts was headed by Professor Sam Motshologane, who was supposed to be a non-faculty dean for a period of three months from the beginning of 1997 – but he held the position until he was asked by the council to take a year’s leave.
Again, the fact is Prof Motshologane also contested the 1996 elections. Unlike what Duffy said, the faculty head was not marched off campus. This is just Duffy’s journalistic sensationalism which borders on lies.
In all of Duffy’s articles there seems to be a wedge drawn between two camps on campus. There are, on the one hand, those represented by Duffy’s sources, that is, the senate, Ndebele and senior academics, and there are, on the other hand, the students, the council, the BTC and workers unions who, according to Duffy, are nothing but unruly elements hell-bent on destroying the university.
Worse of all, they are not capable of taking sensible decisions, they embezzle funds and are nothing short of hooligans. Even the victory he speaks about is just an irony, meaning that the good lamb of the south, Njabulo Ndebele, and his group of managers fell at the wrong hands of some “uncultured” students and workers. What a stereotype of a new order.
Duffy again seems to suggest that the BTC is just another structure meant to fight Ndebele and his lot. Besides the fact that broad transformation forums are now compulsory in institutions of higher learning, Turfloop established this body in the early 1990s as a way of making sure that transformation does take place. This was because Turfloop was largely constructed for the wrong motives by the apartheid regime.
As its first task, the BTC looked at changing the composition of the council in 1992. Since then, the council has been democratically elected and has been a largely representative body of all structures on campus.
This is also the case with the BTC. All stakeholders are represented, but there are people, like Duffy’s sources, who choose not to attend meetings of this forum.
This is not to imply that the BTC was run by a group of angels, but there were serious problems as to what its role should be. This does not mean that people could not participate in shaping the direction of this university through this forum.
But what happened is that senior academics moved away from this structure knowing that whatever issues are raised, they will either block them through the senate (which is still very white until now) or other management structures. These are the frustrations that Turfloop faced until recently, when a clear direction for the BTC was shaped.
As far as Dr Biki Minyuku’s secondment or non-secondment to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is concerned, the university community did not know what the conclusion was. The position was advertised and filled amid controversy.
When asked early this year about the status of Minyuku, the executive director of public affairs, John Wiltshire, said in the local newspaper that the case had been concluded.
Isn’t it surprising that now Duffy says Minyuku’s case is still in court? If that is true, why did the university management appoint another registrar, Peter Malgas? Or does it reveal what Duffy failed to openly declare in his articles, that the university is run by lunatics? Of course, telephone journalism would not help Duffy understand all these intricacies.
I bring up all these issues and more because of the love I have for the institution and the frustration that some of Duffy’s articles have caused. Has the Mail & Guardian receded to that level of sloppiness to allow such wholesale evasion of truth to get published?
They only report about us because Ndebele is their only source of interest and they would do anything to uplift his name, as they did when he applied for the University of the Witwatersrand post, and after his departure, the M&G would not take interest in the Turfloop issues with the same interest they displayed in the Wits vice-chancellor race.
Why is it that the M&G never wanted to establish the profile of candidates and publicly put them under scrutiny? Again, my question is: are we too far in the north to warrant your holy attention, sir?
Benny Malatji, University of the North
n Andy Duffy replies: The role and performance of the university’s council is the subject of an investigation ordered by the minister of education. That investigation also includes the influence enjoyed by the university’s BTC over Turfloop’s affairs.
From my conversations with the BTC’s general secretary, it is clear the BTC regards itself as the highest authority at Turfloop and that those who stand in its way are blocking transformation (as the BTC defines it).
Ndebele and the senate are prime examples. We would of course like to profile all the candidates to replace Ndebele – partly because it would give many on the Turfloop campus an idea of the quality of the council’s shortlist. Those in the dark, until we reported the names, included Jeremy Cronin – one of the five people the council assigned to a committee set up to find suitable replacements.
However, Minyuku, the candidate clearly favoured by both the Student Representative Council and the BTC, has so far refused to comment.
Our interest in Turfloop is not limited to Ndebele. Other elements of interest include: its crippling student debt; the annual uproar on campus when management try to get students to repay that debt; the collapse of student enrolment at Turfloop; whether the university is going to survive the year; the number of academics that students claim have made racist remarks or have racist backgrounds; and that the university’s council – or, more precisely, those who bother to attend its meetings – has chosen to ignore all this, and instead launches a commission of inquiry into what’s left of Ndebele’s administration.
Too far in the north to warrant our attention? Clearly not.