David Macfarlane
Vista University’s senior management creams off astonishingly high perks, at a time when the university’s financial crisis ranks among the worst in the country.
An annual credit card allowance of R120 000 and cellphone allowance of R36 000 are among the extra- ordinary perks available to vice- chancellor Professor CT Keto. Four other senior managers can each indulge in cellphone chat to the tune of R24 000 a year. Two managers can sting the cash-strapped university for R72 000 a year on their credit cards, and another two R60 000 each.
Yet senior management is also driving through drastic cost-cutting measures that are inducing both anger and despair among Vista academic staff and unions.
“They [management] have no integrity. Whose interests do they have at heart?” asks one outraged academic. Vista unions say the university’s cost-cutting measures are so “encompassing that a negotiated settlement would not be possible”.
Core academic functions at Vista are now tottering. Incensed staff say the university no longer offers any postgraduate bursaries, and all student support services have been trimmed to the point where they are non-existent. Support programmes training students in basic academic skills such as essay writing have all been stopped. So too has a programme in which senior students offered counselling and support services in students’ mother tongues.
Academics complain that cuts to the library budget mean that necessary teaching aids can’t be purchased.
Confidential documents show that the remuneration committee of Vista’s highest decision-making body its council not only approved the credit card and cellphone allowances but recommended that these amounts, as well as car allowances, be included in the salaries of these senior managers. This move would place beyond scrutiny the purposes for which these managers are using their university-funded cellphones and credit cards.
The universities of Cape Town, the Witwatersrand, Port Elizabeth, Fort Hare and Natal are among those that provide no credit-card allowances at all to any staff. And the few that subsidise cellphone expenses do so at a minute fraction of Vista’s largesse. Natal approves up to R250 a month in certain highly regulated circumstances; Stellenbosch between R200 and R600. Rhodes senior management have to account monthly for each call and pay for their personal calls.
The chair of Vista’s council, W Mabasa, presided over the meeting in August last year that approved these perks for senior management. Mabasa failed to respond to the Mail & Guardian’s questions.
Asked why such large credit card allowances are necessary, Keto ducked the question in replies on his behalf from Hanrie Greebe of Vista’s media liaison deparment.
Greebe also says the amounts of R36000 and R24000 for cellphones were part of a “proposal document” discussed at the council’s remuneration committee in August and that this “document was withdrawn at the time”. This does not square with confidential documentation in the M&G’s possession.
How tertiary institutions deploy their funds is likely to be addressed in the minister of education’s national education plan, due to be presented to the Cabinet at the end of February.
Additional reporting by Roshila Pillay