Not the Mail & Guardian is Robert Kirby’s startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental
Four institutions only will make up South Africa’s higher education system within a year. There will be one vast mega-university, plus the Walter Sisulu University for Technology and Science (WSU), the University of the Western Cape and Mangosuthu Technikon (MT).
Mergers on January 1 this year were to be the final set of forced marriages. A government decree delayed WSU’s merger for six months.
But ‘there’s a third and final stage”, Minister of Education Naledi Pandor told Not the Mail & Guardian in a candid and exclusive interview late on New Year’s Eve in her Pretoria office. She told Not the M&G:
The single mega-university will be based in Gauteng;
The partners in this polygamous marriage will be the merged institutions, plus Vista University;
It will open on January 1 2006;
Six of the seven non-merging institutions — Wits, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Rhodes, Free State and Pretoria — will be closed down;
WSU will receive no further government interference;
MT — one of the smallest and worst-performing tertiary institutions, whose vice-chancellor earned nearly R3-million in 2003 (about three times more than President Thabo Mbeki) — will continue as it is.
Asked about her rationale, Pandor told Not the M&G: ‘Let’s begin at the beginning, which is when President Thabo Mbeki did the right thing and appointed me Minister of Education.”
‘But I inherited a disgusting mess. The smell, for a start: this place reeked of cigarette smoke. I tried everything. But nothing worked, nothing. I eventually had to resort, reluctantly, to using public funds for new carpets, curtains and furniture.”
The ‘unspeakable” state of her office was ‘merely symbolic” of the national education ‘shambles” she has set about ‘putting right”.
‘My mega-university is my first initiative to clear up the garbage heap I discovered here. I’ve chosen first to concentrate on higher education, because the stink coming from that sector is especially disgusting — although it has admittedly been hard to decide what is most rotten.”
Pandor explained that two chief considerations underlie her decision: The huge financial savings and increased efficiency that will be effected by getting rid of 99% of vice-chancellors (VCs), deputy vice-chancellors (DVCs) and tertiary executive managers.
The better deployment of funds that are currently wasted ‘in pretending we can afford to put every deserving soul through higher education”.
Why Gauteng? Its population is mostly urban. ‘Talented individuals from rural areas — the Sipho Seepes, the William Makgobas — will get there [to higher education] anyway.”
The three Eastern Cape institutions making up WSU have been ‘on the receiving end of quite enough bureaucratic bullying for too long now, because they’ve never had the political clout of, say, Fort Hare”.
On MT, Pandor alluded to ‘political reasons” that she could not divulge. The inclusion of Vista will ‘take care of the legal hitches created by the idiots who recommended Vista’s closure and the brutally brainless government functionaries who then set about shutting the place down this year.”
On the vast reduction in senior executive staff, she said: ‘Your sister publication, the Mail & Guardian, recently exposed the grotesque earnings of some of those freeloaders.”
‘Nuts and bolts” details remain, such as where in Gauteng the mega-university will be situated. The minister referred to the Airports Company of South Africa having to look elsewhere.
But raging volcanoes of festive midnight fireworks killing or maiming children and pets, and burning a prominent Wits academic, rendered her exact words inaudible.
These details will be released in the first two weeks of February. Then the ‘idle bunch [of tertiary staff] return to what they laughably call ‘work’ after yet another of the extraordinarily long holidays they seem to expect is their constitutional right”.
Not the M&G called 842 academics for comment, but none was able to provide any. VCs, DVCs and executive managers were unavailable in places such as Nice, Mauritius and the Phinda Private Game Reserve. —