Mangcu: the real issue
Xolela Mangcu’s resignation from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has been presented in the Mail & Guardian as an assault on academic freedom (December 15). But the issue is not quite so easy. There is a much weightier question of the status of South Africa’s research councils. If Xolela’s resignation opens a debate about that, he will have rendered us a genuine service.
Former CEO Mark Orkin turned the HSRC round, leaving it much better regarded, domestically and internationally. But transformation has come at a cost, including increasing corporatisation, grafted on to an authoritarian public service culture.
Executive directors who lead research programmes were granted extensive authority over staff and heavy responsibility to raise research funds to meet stiff financial targets. Research staff were set financial targets and required to cut corners if necessary to deliver to budget and on time. Those who didn’t were increasingly squeezed out or subjected to disciplinary proceedings.
Research programmes tended to be silos, fundamentally, in financial competition and staff had to do the research they were told to do. The benefits to researchers were there if they secured interesting and well-funded research projects.
Of all the research councils, the HSRC is the most successful and has gone the furthest towards corporatisation. Yet it is definitely not a university. Researchers lose much autonomy, notably to do research for which there is no direct funding.
Most research is policy-driven, and researchers are as accountable to clients as to the broader research community. This also means research agendas are determined by available money, so that what govern-ment or donors want tends to dictate what researchers do.
This is not wholly wrong: the councils are there to serve the public more directly than university researchers. But it can seem to restrict academic freedom.
The HSRC’s controversial media policy is a product of corporatisation, designed “to regulate the interaction between the HSRC and the media to protect our image and reputation and to minimise the potential for friction with its stakeholders”.
Its formal provisions are relatively inoffensive — it is the implementation and motivation that seem to be causing all the trouble. There is resentment that they were handed down by management as a pronunciamento, without wider consultation. The media policy is no great infringement of intellectual freedom, just corporate nonsense that is probably best ignored. It has done unnecessary damage to the HSRC’s reputation and, if not abolished, should be re-examined by researchers as a whole, not just by management and council.
If, as Mangcu says, the media policy is a direct outcome of heavy political breathing, the politicians should be told to back off. CEO Olive Shisana equally strongly denies that the policy has anything to do with orders from on high.
But if we allow the debate to degenerate into whether Mangcu or Shisana is right, we miss the opportunity to ask more fundamental questions about the role, status and function of research councils relative to universities; their responsibilities and accountability to government, parliament and the public; the extent of their independence from government; the burying of uncomfortable research findings by govern-ment departments; the corrosive effect of corporatisation on scientific research in research councils and the universities; and the dangers and opportunities of donor-funded research. — Roger Southall, HSRC. (He doubts whether this is the HSRC’s official opinion.)
A god that must be tamed
The “legacy of blood and bronze” of the Indo-Europeans would not seem half so fearful to Drew Forrest (December 23) if he accepted that their descendants have been dealing with this legacy since the earliest times.
Ancient Greece was the love child of a benign fusion of sky gods and earth gods, some of whom were male. He notes Athene’s soldierly practices, but omits mention of Apollo’s love for Hyacinth.
Perhaps it was this responsive relationship between the militant and pastoral societies that led the Greeks, uniquely in the ancient world, to relegate their own mythology to the realm of fiction.
The Grecian legacy, very different from “blood and bronze”, was drawn on by the Renaissance in a European drive toward a culture of human rights that led, in the late 18th century, to the unseating of patriarchal monarchies; in the early 19th to the abolition of slavery; and to putting an end to Hitler’s idiot pipe dream and containing the equally idiotic communist pipe dream in the 20th.
Despite the destruction wreaked by Hitler, Stalin and, to a lesser extent, George W Bush, modern Europeans have given the world, by example, a culture of individual freedom and democratic governance, and established the United Nations to promote these.
This does not make them “God’s gift to the world”. The patriarchal God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, the spiritual legacy of the Indo-Europeans and their imitators, is a gift of dubious value that has been given to the world by Europeans and others.
The taming of this God in the 21st century will mark the final eclipse of the legacy of “blood and bronze”. — Jacko Binn, Cape Town
Insult to a statesman of integrity
Your 2005 Cabinet report card (December 23) gave Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi a grade F for his leadership of the Inkatha Freedom Party. This is a disdainful insult to one of our nation’s few statesmen of integrity.
You claim Buthelezi is inhibiting “fresh ideas” and frustrated the “revisionist” Ziba Jiyane.
In 2005, Buthelezi crisply spelt out coherent public policy positions on HIV/Aids, crime and the economy.
The proposals in his speech on federalism at the European Parliament in March would revolutionise service delivery and political decision-making in South Africa.
So would his proposed local government reforms, rooted in his vision of localism and the new entrepreneurial state. His proposals on electoral reform would address pitiful levels of voter apathy and the gaping democratic deficit.
In television, radio and press interviews, and in speeches, Buthelezi set out the IFP’s position on topics including Tony Blair’s African Commission, Darfur, Zimbabwe and Africa’s HIV/Aids pandemic.
He held discussions with opinion-makers in South Africa and Europe as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Margaret Thatcher.
Yet in 2005, there was not one request from the Mail & Guardian for his views on a public policy issue. Clearly, you are not interested in the views of the leader of the largest predominantly black-led opposition party.
As for Jiyane, the nation is still no wiser about the substance of his self-styled modernism four months after he established his own party with votes stolen from us.
Yes, the IFP has much to do to shift the moribund public debate and regain KwaZulu-Natal. Opposition in South Africa is tough. And it will require some difficult decisions in 2006 — but this will not include ditching the best team captain we could have. — Musa Zondi, IFP secretary general
Removals not for mining
Nic Dawes (“Living up to diamonds”, December 9) paints a deceitful picture of Botswana as a possibly corrupt nation that sides with rich industrialists in driving the Basarwa from their land in a quest for diamonds.
Botswana did not move the Basarwa for mining, but because it was increasingly difficult to protect wildlife resources in the reserve and provide sufficient land for traditional use by hunter-gatherer communities.
The Basarwa’s lifestyle has changed — they began using horses, dogs, traps, spears and guns for hunting, threatening the ecological balance. They also depended on boreholes, trucked water supplies and food rations.
Independent researchers have also argued that the situation is environmentally untenable. Cambridge University’s James Suzman observed in 2003: “With easy water the Xade population grew rapidly. By 1980 it was a permanent settlement … Game avoided the area, veld-foods were over-utilised and the people grew increasingly reliant on state aid. Residents also realised that with permanent water they could keep livestock … Horses and dogs were particularly prized since they radically increased hunting efficiency and range.
“Likewise, year-round access to potable water allowed the Xade population to experiment with cultivation.”
The government consulted the stakeholders, including the settlements in the reserve. It was only 12 years later that the relocation started, and then only 17 people refused to relocate. A few of those who had earlier relocated have moved in and out of the reserve, leading to a fluctuating population of between 50 and 70.
It is Botswana government policy to relocate citizens for conservation purposes. Residents of protected areas are encouraged to relocate because modern economic activities conflict with the reserves’ main aim — to conserve Botswana’s unique wildlife heritage for sustainable use.
People have also been encouraged to move to give themselves and their children the benefits of development.
In an effort to denounce De Beers as a corrupt corporation, Dawes alludes to its partnerships with dubious African governments. Botswana is internationally acclaimed for its lack of corruption. In Transparency International’s annual corruption index, it was again named Africa’s least corrupt country.
Dawes refers to the Basarwa as “Bushmen”, a derogatory term favoured by outsiders who seek to project an image of them as an exotic race living in splendid isolation as hunter-gatherers.
Such patronage from our pale cousins south of the border is unfortunately too common. — Sydney Mogapi, Johannesburg
There was progress at Montreal
Your editorial of December 15 takes an uninformed view of South Africa’s stance at the recent Montreal Conference. On the one hand, developed nations are required to begin discussions of new greenhouse gas emissions targets for post-2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires. On the other, there is increasing pressure on large developing country emitters, such as South Africa, to take on emissions limitation or reduction commitments.
In Montreal, agreement was reached to begin both negotiations, despite opposition by the Bush administration and others. There were other positive outcomes, including agreement to begin work on adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change, a priority for developing countries.
It is also a mistake to assume the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism can push an agenda unchecked by foreign affairs and others. There are many “targets” needed, and those primarily responsible for the problem — industrialised nations — should lead on legally binding emissions reductions and paying to support adaptation and facilitating global use of best technologies.
Of course, greater urgency is needed. We must continue to pressure our government to do far more to limit emissions and initiate adaptation measures without waiting for donor funding. But when good work is done to preserve the multilateral system, rejecting the voluntary approach, this should be acknowledged. — Elin Lorimer, Earthlife Africa
Bull artist
South African cricket captain Graeme “Warne is a wanna-be captain” Smith is the biggest yarpie bullshit artist since the late and not so great Hansie Cronje.
There is a joke that makes the rounds every time South Africa plays Australia at any sport: three tourists, a South African, a Zimbabwean and a Pom (Brit), are travelling Australia by car. Guess who is driving? The police.
Yarpies have always been envious of Australians. You have Aids and crime … and we don’t.
Australia — beautiful one day, paradise the next. — Mark Tomkinson, Bridgetown, Australia