The student representative council (SRC) of Technikon South Africa in KwaZulu-Natal has been under suspension for six weeks after its members refused to accept a proposal by the acting student dean that three senior national SRC office bearers be paid stipends totalling R15 000 a month.
A document, released to the rectorate and all provincial SRCs in March, proposed that the national SRC president be paid a stipend of R6 000 a month, the secretary R5 000 and the treasurer R4 000, said Bheki ka Mkhize, SRC chairperson in KwaZulu-Natal.
“The KwaZulu-Natal SRC members were suspended after we said it was not acceptable for these members to be paid and that one of them, the national SRC president, a close associate of the dean, was not a registered student,” Ka Mkhize said.
David Mashishi, the acting student dean, said the KwaZulu-Natal SRC members were suspended because of their “unbecoming behaviour, which was totally out of line with technikon policy”.
“These members allegedly illegally accessed another student’s information [on the technikon’s computers] without that student’s knowledge or the knowledge of the authorities,” Mashishi said, referring to the technikon records of Simon Monama, the national SRC president.
“We found out that Monama is not a registered student and that his academic performance was not acceptable,” Ka Mkhize said.
“The suspension came after we informed students through the media that we disagreed with a document that said three national SRC office bearers should be paid. We could also not allow ourselves to be led by an unregistered student,” Ka Mkhize said.
Mashishi declined to confirm the amounts of the stipends. He said he would wait for the report of investigators appointed by the rectorate after allegations in the media that there were close ties between Mashishi and Monama.
The report was scheduled to be released on Friday.
Mashishi said that the KwaZulu-Natal SRC did not bother to understand the proposal before “running to the media”. He said the idea was to bring the entire SRC national working committee to stay in Florida, Johannesburg, for them to be near the national office.
“This is where they attend the committee meetings and their bi-weekly meetings,” Mashishi said.
However, the technikon’s rectorate rejected the proposal at a meeting in July.
“The bottom line is that the KwaZulu-Natal SRC members breached the code of conduct of the institution,” Mashishi said. “The rectorate is going to go through the report from the investigators. There is a huge possibility that they might be called before an internal disciplinary hearing.”
He refused to specify which code of conduct was breached, saying he did not want to jeopardise the report. The investigators are two staff members and a member of the SRC. Mashishi refused to disclose their names.
“We were suspended for three weeks at the beginning of November. Ironically, this suspension is still current and no reasons are given,” Ka Mkhize said.
“The suspension [of the SRC] is still current because the investigations are being completed and these SRC members failed to cooperate when they were needed,” said Mashishi.
“Ka Mkhize was once the national president of the SRC and we must not forget that he might also have ambitions of reoccupying that seat,” he added.
Ka Mkhize said: “Mashishi once accused the KwaZulu-Natal SRC of having a political vendetta against Monama and him. He said this because of his strong leanings to the African National Congress and Monama’s affiliation to the South African Student Congress [the student wing of the ANC].”