Culture clashes, the future employment conditions of staff and the financial sustainability of what will be this country’s largest university of technology have cast a shadow over its progress just six weeks before the nuptial is due to happen.
The new university of technology will arise from the merger between Technikon Pretoria, Technikon Northern Gauteng and Technikon North-West.
”My fear is whether we will be able to make that successful transition,” the vice-chancellor of Technikon Pretoria, Professor Reggie Ngcobo, told the Mail & Guardian.
The new merged institution will be called Tshwane University of Technology — as technikons will now be known, according to an announcement by Minister of Education Kader Asmal last month. It will be the largest in South Africa, bringing together 58 000 students and 2 000 staff.
Yet weeks before Tshwane University of Technology is formed, stakeholders are raising troublesome issues.
The chairperson of the National Union of Tertiary Educators in South Africa (Nutesa) at Pretoria Technikon, Dr Simon Sauer, said: ”If the merger is purely about the political agenda, then you might say that it will work. If it’s about the standards that have been built up, especially at this institution over the years, then I can’t comment until I know what the quality of [staff and students] will be at the new institution. At the moment I am hoping for the best.”
Established in 1979 by the National Party government, Pretoria Technikon is the largest of the three merging institutions, with 42 000 students. Its origin as a historically white institution has made it problematic in the current climate of transformation. Although the student racial composition has changed since 1994 (79% of students are black and 21% white; about 55% are female and 45% male), it is infrastructurally superior to its merger partners.
”The other two [institutions] are half our size in terms of student and staff numbers, physical facilities and programmes,” said Ngcobo. ”This doesn’t, however, mean that we are legally superior.”
Professor Johhny Molefe, the vice-chancellor of Technikon North-West, and Professor George Lenyai, the vice-chancellor of Technikon Northern Gauteng, said in a joint written response to questions sent by the M&G that ”the merger of the three technikons is a merger between equals and [is] neither a take-over nor [an] incorporation”.
Technikon Northern Gauteng is the smallest of the merger partners. Established in 1976 to provide technical training in nursing, electronic and mechanical engineering and secretarial work for Africans, it is located in Soshanguve, 57km north of Tshwane. When first established it was called Technikon Mabopane East and was in the former Bophuthatswana homeland. It had a staff complement of six and 65 students. In 1984 the technikon was renamed Technikon Northern Transvaal. The current name was launched in 1997. It has a student body of 11 000 — 100% black, with 53% female and 47% male.
Technikon North-West was first established as Ga-Rankuwa Technical Training Centre in 1976. It was upgraded to technikon status in 1979 and renamed Setlogelo Technikon. In 1996 it acquired its current name. It is 32km from Tshwane and has a total of 4 000 students, 100% of whom are black, with 67% female and 33% male students.
The educational inferiority to which apartheid consigned them has proved an obstacle to the merger for Technikon Northern Gauteng and Technikon North-West. The moot point — which senior staffers say could lead to litigation — is over differences in staff salaries and benefits between the three institutions.
According to the director of strategic planning at Technikon Northern Gauteng, Dr Engela van Staden, legal action could ”happen [if] parity and harmonisation of staff conditions are not reached”.
Staff unions at all three institutions are concerned that the merger teams are dragging their feet over the finalisation of staff salaries and benefits at the new merged institution.
Johan Loots, the Nutesa treasurer at Technikon Northern Gauteng, said: ”The staff have got the feeling that things are going to be totally different — they are not sure what to expect.”
Molefe and Lenyai said ”staff retrenchments or severance packages are not under consideration at this stage. The integration of the three institutions must first be completed and staff needs determined before retrenchments or severances will be considered.”
Yet, said Ngcobo, ”I foresee staff cuts at the senior level because at the moment there are many of us. But when the tyre hits the road I guess that the number of students we are serving might warrant that most of the staff are retained.”
He said that, beyond this, ”the most difficult bridge that [the three institutions] have to work on is integrating cultures, integrating programmes, integrating fee structures”.
”We are all technikons but each one of us has its own unique character, making the merger even more difficult,” he said. ”The fees structure for next year is still a bit of a nuisance. This is compounded by the fact that we don’t know where and what courses will be offered.”
A ”joint specialised team” has been formed to determine fees for Tshwane University of Technology, and a similar team is tackling courses. According to Molefe and Lenyai: ”No more than 10% of the total number of programmes offered are currently offered at more than one campus.”
Ngcobo said a final decision on both fees and courses will be made by the end of this month. Dovetailing this decision is the logistically thorny issue of distance. Pretoria and North-West technikons are 32km apart; North-West and Northern Gauteng technikons are 17km apart, while Technikon Pretoria is 57km away from Technikon Northern Gauteng.
”This is an issue that students are particularly concerned about and which needs to be addressed quickly,” Technikon North-West student representative council (SRC) president Philani Hlatshwayo told the M&G. ”In addition to this, students are uncertain about the merger of three different institutional cultures. People have this tendency of saying that students from Technikon Pretoria are better than those from the other two institutions. These are the issues we still have to resolve.”
There are 16 joint specialised teams with representatives from all three institutions, working on academic planning, registration, human resources, cultural integration and organisational structure. They report to three ”institutional merger teams” — one for each institution. Van Staden describes these teams as the ”internal drivers of the merger process”.
These teams report to a joint merger team of seven members from the three institutions. Its mandate is to ”steer” the process. This team reports to the interim transitional council, which comprises the council chairpersons and vice-chancellors of the three institutions. About 250 staff members are involved in these groups.
Underlying all these challenges, however, is the cost of the merger. Sauer said: ”If this merger is going to be a success, the government of today will have to dock up money.”
In his medium-term budget policy statement last week, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel identified the provision of higher education transformation as one of the priorities over the next three years. ”Education continues to dominate social services,” he said. He committed R3-billion to the ”transformation and recapitalisation of higher education institutions”, together with the sector education and training authorities.
”Now we have this major strategic burden to ensure that this merger occurs in January,” said Ngcobo. ”We do not want to create a situation where we focus on the merger process and forget our business.”
According to the president of the Technikon Pretoria SRC, Reggie Ditsela, fears among students have been allayed by a ”massive communication campaign led by the vice-chancellor” and ”feeling [now] is generally positive”.
Students qualifying at the end of this academic year, or the beginning of next year after writing their supplementary exams, will be awarded graduation certificates from the technikon where they enrolled. After that, students will receive a graduation certificate from Tshwane University of Technology with an endorsement indicating which technikon the qualification was obtained.
Meanwhile, the three institutions are confident that the ”legal merger” will be in place in January next year, said Molefe and Lenyai. The ”substantive merger” will take longer.
Said Ngcobo: ”If you want this thing to happen, do it quickly to circumvent potential resistance. The more time you give it, the more time there is for people to contemplate and find the best reasons for not making it work —something I call the paralysis factor.”