Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s dramatic intervention this week in the alarming governance fiasco at South Africa’s largest university, Unisa, has come not a moment too soon. For more than a year the head of Unisa’s council, advocate McCaps Motimele, has been running the university like a tinpot dictator, creating factions and conflict in an institution that started its own admirable programme of transformation well before Motimele assumed office.
Councils are the highest decision-making bodies of universities and technikons. By law at least 60% of councillors must be external members. They are usually high-profile people in areas such as business and law who offer their governance expertise to tertiary institutions free as a public service. But the auditor general has now established that Motimele and some other Unisa councillors have been raking in huge amounts of money in some cases for meetings they didn’t even attend.
The remuneration of Unisa councillors is only one of the controversies that have tarnished a great university one that has traditionally served students of all ages, races and income groups. Contrary to all known academic practice in this country and abroad, Motimele has involved himself constantly in university administration, to the extent of overturning senior academic appointments that the university’s senate had already ratified as it is empowered to do.
In addition, Motimele has been waging warfare with the government on grounds that have left most observers mystified. It is perfectly reasonable, for example, that Asmal should have requested the auditor general to investigate councillors’ remuneration: public money is involved, and higher education legislation repeatedly stresses that councils must be publicly accountable. Equally, there is widespread support for the impending merger of Unisa, Technikon SA and Vista University’s Distance Education Centre. So why the hostility that the Unisa council has been aiming at the government?
Motimele has repeatedly claimed that his uniquely hands-on role at Unisa is in the service of racial redress and transformation. But this claim, never convincing in the first place, looks decidedly tatty now: huge numbers of black academics are among those who have signed petitions expressing no confidence in the council.
What we have been witnessing is a tawdry power play in which the interests of Unisa, of distance education and of national education priorities have been shamefully sidelined. In higher education, as in all spheres of education, South Africa has been undergoing since 1994 a remarkable revolution aimed at repairing decades of apartheidinduced inequalities and discriminations. The national higher education plan, which Asmal released in February, envisages a single, dedicated distance education institution with a formidable infrastructure and array of technical expertise.
It beggars belief that this worthy goal could have been imperilled by one man’s ambitions. Thousands of South Africans rely on distance education to improve their lives; their interests must be paramount. We wholeheartedly endorse Asmal’s intention to dissolve Unisa’s thoroughly discredited council and look forward to the restoration of normal governance at a university this country cannot do without.
Digestion of Verwoerd’s party
The “co-operation pact” between the African National Congress and the New National Party announced this week is charged with mind-boggling historical irony. It marks the start of the ANC’s digestion of the party of Hendrik Verwoerd and PW Botha.
NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk insists the pact entrenches the integrity of his party, which will remain an independent force in South African politics. Temporarily, at least, its position will be strengthened by the ANC’s agreement to bring it into the national Cabinet and provincial executive councils, as well as installing an NNP premier in the Western Cape.
But a secret provision gives the ANC control of the Western Cape executive at a future point, when the pretence that the pact is a deal between equals can be safely discarded. Does Van Schalkwyk imagine that the NNP will be treated so generously after the 2004 elections? It is a racing certainty that its headlong electoral decline, evident since 1994, will continue, and that its support base will shrink to the Western Cape. In partnership with the ANC, it will have no appeal for “gatvol” whites and other disgruntled minority voters. The black electorate would have no reason to support it, rather than its ANC partner. Even among the blue-collar coloured voters of the Western Cape, its only remaining constituency, it is likely to be squeezed by the ANC and Democratic Alliance.
The pact provides for the harmonisation of policy through a joint forum. Given the ANC’s dominant role in the partnership, and the policy vacuum in the NNP, this can only serve to impose the ideological hegemony of the ruling party.
Van Schalkwyk has disentangled himself from one suffocating embrace that of his Democratic Party ally in the DA only to fall into another. He and his party may have been given a short reprieve, but the reality is that they are doomed no matter which bedfellow they choose.