In reading Professor Malegapuru Makgoba’s rendition of why he has excluded me from applying for a post at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), I have felt a peculiar mixture of outrage and boredom.
The outrage is easy to understand. Makgoba uses the truth like my diabetic Aunty Ivy used sugar in her last days: sparingly. Give either of them too much of their own unique poison and it is quite disconcerting to watch their reasoning cloud over and intemperance begin: an intemperance that leads Makgoba to say the most shameful things. Noam Chomsky has dementia. His South African detractors are a bunch of Indians or ultra-leftists.
Makgoba has said so much that is untrue and simply illogical, that to compose a list of his outrages would be boring. But it is exemplary of the man that, with the juice from the calamari steaks he ate when the two of us met at Simply Fish at the Pavilion on February 7 still drying on his lips, he proclaims 10 days later that the last time we met was in 2004. The richer of the two of us by far, Makgoba paid. With a credit card. There is thus a paper trail, if anyone cares to follow it. It is one of many trails revealing that Makgoba either tells very silly lies or has worrying lapses of memory for a man tasked with running a university.
But is it memory or understanding? When I have, three weeks ago already, taken up his challenge to make the agreement between then-University of Durban Westville (UDW) and myself public, when he and my lawyer have been quoting from it and debating its interpretation in the very newspaper whose board he heads and which he presumably also reads, Makgoba alleges that I am withholding it. Astonishing. Dementia?
There is a sinister edge to what Makgoba has to say about me. He insinuates that the recommendations of the Gautschi Commission make my employment undesirable. Let us be clear, the since discredited Gautschi Commission recommended that certain allegations be pursued against me and other union leaders. It made no disciplinary findings. Three-quarters of the way through my disciplinary hearing, UDW made an offer to settle. I would resign. My future presence on campus would be regulated by the vice-chancellor and I would be paid R250 000 in lieu of lost earnings, legal costs and in order to withdraw a defamation suit I was pursuing against the then vice-chancellor. After deductions and fees, I received what for Makgoba would be less than a month’s salary.
Interestingly, Makgoba was embroiled in disciplinary charges of his own at Wits University. Unlike my charges, which flowed from political acts, his revolved around alleged personal acts of dishonesty, namely embellishing his CV and theft of private documents. These allegations were never aired.
What is most worrying about Makgoba’s attack on me is that he has hauled out his very well-worn deck of race cards. In the past, when he sensed that senior academics were sceptical of his restructuring plans, he compared the whites among them to baboons in an inane and widely slated piece.
Progressive forces never really warmed to him either. Perhaps they remembered the day that, without irony and in a fit of gat-kruiping [arse-creeping], he described a speech by President Thabo Mbeki, politician and then still Aids-denialist, as being equal in import, when history does its final reckoning, to the discovery by Albert Einstein of the special theory of relativity. When African workers led the recent nine-day strike at UKZN, he, flippantly or not, resorts to ethnic explanations (”mindless Zulus”). Of the 20 academics who have written in support of my candidature, he notices that four are of Indian extraction and, by so singling them out, imputes racist motives in their support. And then, those who question his ideas of transformation, we are mysteriously told, are ultra-leftists.
There is a racist pong hanging over UKZN. But it is not all Makgoba’s fault. This is because, but for the fact that Makgoba is African and deploys this quality as a pre-emptive cover for his mismanagement of the institution, he would have been laughed off campus long ago. In this, academics, trade unions, council members and other stakeholders are all complicit. They have allowed themselves to be cowed by naked race-baiting and the spurious deployment of the language of transformation for reactionary ends.
And all of this by a person whose autobiographical writings are drenched in an egoism that is frankly embarrassing. Makgoba may affect a dashiki every now and again, but happily signs papers evicting poor African families living undisturbed on a corner of the UDW campus for 10 years. Makgoba may install himself in a lavish ceremony bedecked in Africanised frippery, but his admission policies disproportionately hurt students from poor, rural African backgrounds. Makgoba may be all for affirmative action, but it is as often used to install a crony or yes-man as to give an opportunity to a deserving candidate.
And should the crony be white or Indian, equity is waived faster than a person can say ”designated group”. Makgoba has often stated that his model for university transformation is Margaret Thatcher. In this instance, it appears that he is telling the truth. Let’s be honest, Makgoba is not building the excellent African university, he is its grave-digger.
In all of this, though, one should not make the mistake of individualising the problem. The almost comprehensive hijacking of the discourse of liberation to empower a narrow elite is a broader social problem. It was controversial to say so in 1996 when I was suspended from UDW, but there is overwhelming evidence of it 10 years later.
We must not end up like the white liberals of the apartheid era who all too easily went with the flow of the empowerment of a minority because it was dressed up in cultural and nationalist language and was enabled by law.
Yes, transformation needs to occur and damn fast. But, if this is the transformation of the kind envisaged by Makgoba, full of name-calling and blatantly protective of privilege, then count me out. But, if it is the transformation imagined by the likes of Fazel Khan, a UKZN lecturer who has stood shoulder to shoulder with people living in squatter camps, and who Makgoba scurrilously includes in his list of Indian supporters of mine just because of his race, then I say, put me with the coolie and the squatters, professor.