Bongani Majola
With mergers of tertiary institutions barely out of the starting blocks, the government has been dragged into another court action.
This week unions at ML Sultan Technikon lodged an urgent high court application to compel Minister of Education Kader Asmal to defer the date of its merger with Technikon Natal, due to take effect next week.
Late last year Unisa brought a court application to delay its merger with TechnikonSA and Vista University’s Distance Education Centre. Asmal has not yet formulated his response to the ministerially appointed National Working Group’s recommendations, released last month, on wide-ranging mergers among tertiary institutions.
The ML Sultan-Technikon Natal merger has always been seen as a “soft” merger that is, unlikely to encounter serious obstacles because it is the result of a voluntary undertaking by both councils of the two institutions, long before the group’s recommendations.
But tension surfaced last week when staff from ML Sultan and students from both institutions delivered petitions to national Department of Education officials calling for a postponement of the merger.
They fear Technikon Natal’s dire finances will affect the sustainability of the merged institution, to be called the Durban Institute of Technology.
Asmal approved a R37-million overdraft this month for the ailing technikon.
Deputy Director General in the education department Nasima Badsha says: “We have been aware of concerns raised by various constituencies, particularly regarding the future financial position of the new technikon. The minister has given assurances that the financial sustainability of the new technikon will not be compromised by the current difficulties at Technikon Natal, and in our assessment there are no barriers to the merger proceeding on the first day of April.”
Last week ML Sultan branches of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union and the National Union of Technikon Employees of South Africa declared a dispute with ML Sultan management on the grounds that “the Minister of Education has given no explicit guarantees to fund the total cost of the merger”, and that the lack of these guarantees would “lead to large-scale retrenchments and instability in the new institution”.