‘Tata my chance …’

A treacherous minister of education, duplicitous and interfering government officials, a shoddy and compromised assessor, infantile members of the governing council, incompetent and self-serving senior managers, ‘Indian histrionics”, short-sighted academics, hostile students who might not even be students, sensationalist and trashy KwaZulu-Natal newspapers … All this — and a dash of ‘Hindu nationalism” to contend with too.

These were the terms in which University of Durban-Westville (UDW) vice-chancellor Saths Cooper this week set about explaining the appalling predicament in which he and the university now find themselves.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Mail & Guardian he said he has been working 15 hours a day, including weekends, in the 10 months since he assumed office, ‘and if in that time I’ve spent 10 quality days with my children and family, that’s a lot”. But he has been let down continually by all and sundry, he said.

Minister of Education Kader Asmal appointed Transnet chairperson Dr Bongani Khumalo in September to investigate suggestions of ‘serious problems in the governance and management” of UDW, ‘strained” governance relationships, a ‘divided” council, and a ‘prevailing climate of fear and suspicion not conducive to an academic environment”.

Khumalo’s findings and recommendations (see sidebar) were released on Tuesday, and Asmal is due to announce on Monday what action he will take.

But Cooper told the M&G his attorneys ‘launched an application [on Wednesday] to interdict [Khumalo’s report], to prevent Asmal from doing anything prejudicial without giving us a chance to respond [before Monday]”.

Explaining that ‘us” means ‘my management, led by me”, Cooper said all UDW heads of department, both academic and non-academic, called him to a meeting after the release of Khumalo’s report.

The meeting was ‘packed out, not even SRO [standing room only] — and they called me, I didn’t call them. I kicked out a press guy and the students. When adults fight, you shouldn’t bring children into it, I told them.”

Then there was a vote on Cooper’s leadership. ‘Fifty-seven voted in favour of me, with four abstentions.” On opposing Asmal, the meeting endorsed ‘a motion saying ‘pursue the minister’”.

On ‘despicable” notions that Cooper should take a ‘golden handshake” and depart before his contract expires in two months, the meeting’s response was ‘Tata my chance, tata my millions” and a plea to him not to take the handshake, a laughing Cooper told the M&G. Asked whether he had been offered this golden escape route, he said: ‘The government can’t offer that, but I’ve had hints of it from the Ministry [of Education].

‘It’s an attempt to get me out of the way.”

Asmal was ‘reckless and irresponsible” in releasing Khumalo’s report, Cooper said, pointing out that it was insensitive and disruptive to do so with students starting exams on Monday. When Asmal briefed the UDW council on Monday about Khumalo’s findings, and asked council members to make submissions on the report by Friday (November 7), he ‘must have known he was misleading us. He knew the report was with the government printers. It’s a breach of trust.”

And the report itself is ‘shocking and sensationalist — obviously for a media feeding frenzy”. It has ‘no methodology”, Khumalo himself was selective in whom he interviewed, and was anyway compromised by being the head of Asmal’s ‘own merger secretariat”.

‘There are 14 000 people in our community [including 11 000 students] — and the report relies on eight interviewees [who are hostile to me].”

Cooper named council members and senior academics who, he said, have axes to grind against him. The axes include Cooper hauling one academic over disciplinary coals on charges of sexual harassment, and his exposure of several staffers’ milking UDW ‘cash cows” illicitly and fraudulently.

And ‘I don’t want to underplay the histrionics of a particular ethnic congregation — Indian. I come from it, but am aware of the histrionics that masquerade as a quest for justice.”

He also named a senior staffer guilty, he said, of pushing a narrow ‘Hindu nationalist” agenda. Cooper’s own promotion of black African representation at UDW ‘makes the likes [of this academic] furious”.

Cooper acknowledged that much of Khumalo’s report homes in on details that the M&G has published over the past months, and that detailed correspondence between the newspaper and himself since April ‘still stands”. He declined to correct or retract any of his written answers to M&G queries since then.

Unexplained mysteries, which Khumalo’s report also pinpoints, therefore still include inconsistencies in Cooper’s various explanations of his remuneration package, lack of council approval of his contract with UDW, and the making of senior appointments in ways that flagrantly flout established UDW statutory procedures for such appointments.

‘After the revelation by you [the M&G] about my package, I looked into it.” The M&G reported in August that his annual package is nearly R1,5-million, rising to R1,9-million if he receives a performance bonus.

The same report noted that he had told the senate earlier this year that his package was in the region of R900 000; and that his written answers to the M&G had repeatedly asserted that his package ‘is nowhere near the R1,5-million you [the M&G] quote”.

‘I told them [UDW], I don’t want that [size of package]: reduce it,” he said this week. ‘It’s a different kettle if they [UDW payroll officials] didn’t know how to calculate it.”

On appointments that flout UDW regulations, and on council adherence to statutory procedures, Cooper said: ‘You know who should be watching that? The registrar of the council … But I got no advice from her [the registrar].”

Yet, like ‘ministers notoriously do in South Africa, I won’t say it wasn’t me … I’m taking responsibility. [But] you’re as good as those you rely on.”

In October, the M&G reported that Cooper had retained a private, unregistered security firm, Samrak, for services Cooper declined at the time to specify, and that he had authorised payment of R174 000 to the company for three months’ work. This week he said: ‘They did serious work.” He referred to UDW’s three entrances and exits, saying corruption relating to deliveries and payments had been rampant until he intervened.

The same M&G report noted yet another unresolved mystery — the bugging of UDW Professor Anand Singh’s home telephone. This bugging — which no one contests occurred — produced a tape of a conversation between Singh (whom Cooper had previously suspended) and Professor Malegepuru Makgoba, vice-chancellor of the University of Natal, in which comments unflattering to Cooper were made.

‘I did investigate the bugging,” Cooper said. ‘I launched it. But the police said we have no locus standi because it was at a private home. I wrote this to Singh. I don’t know who would have benefited from the bugging.”

A crippling flaw in Khumalo’s document, Cooper said, is its failure to consider ‘our written response” to an earlier PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

Senior UDW representatives say Cooper commissioned the Pricewaterhouse report to pre-empt Khumalo’s investigation, but that this seriously backfired on Cooper when the report delivered a devastating indictment of him. It confirmed all the details the M&G had published about Samrak and irregular appointments.

It added that R10 590,24 had been used to purchase suits, shirts and shoes for two members of the students representative council.

But Cooper’s written response to the Pricewaterhouse report was ‘completely ignored by [Khumalo]”.

‘If [Khumalo’s] report is true, get the police in, investigate me, suspend me, but don’t engage in a smear campaign that wouldn’t be happening if there were not a merger. Things [at UDW] are running now.”

UDW is due to merge with Natal in January, and tensions between the two institutions have been boiling for months. Speculation has centred on Cooper’s leadership intentions: will he compete with Makgoba for the top job? This week he referred the M&G to his answer last November, when the newspaper asked him about this. He said then he had no interest in a leadership position in the merged institution.

‘All internal constituencies were opposed to the merger,” he said this week. ‘I’ve been going around persuading them [to support it] … I persuaded, cajoled, bludgeoned people into accepting the need for a merger. But [those who oppose me] want to sink back into a narrow territorialism.”

‘The worst [if I leave UDW] is I’ll open a therapy practice,” Cooper — a qualified psychologist — said. ‘I used to have a company offering psycho-social services. It had a multimillion-rand turnover. It’s in other people’s hands now.”