March 7 to 13 2008

UFS managers must go

The barbarity at the University of Free State (UFS) has been reported by almost every newspaper and TV station in Australia. It has done damage to our country, and brought shame on our nation, but it is not entirely the students’ fault.

UFS management has cultivated a racist atmosphere for years. How else do you explain that 14 years after the Constitution was enacted it still hasn’t integrated its residences?

UFS staff boasted to me of how their online learning arm would swell the ranks of black students without bringing them on to campus. The first time I visited the university, in 1998, I met a legal academic whose office walls were plastered with the posters of right-wing organisations. On my second visit, in 2005, she had been elevated to the status of professor.

The only solution is for UFS to clear out its almost completely white Afrikaans-speaking top management. It is, after all, a publicly funded institution. — Andy Schmulow, law lecturer, Victoria University

I am a (white) medical practitioner working in a rural area with medical and nursing professionals predominantly of other races. After watching the UFS video I was amazed at the drama that has been made of it. It is quite obviously an amateur effort at a humorous video. The humour was not of a very high standard, but it was a harmless student prank. The black people involved played along heartily without any sign of coercion.

From friends who were students at Reitz hostel, I gathered that an easy, congenial relationship exists between students and domestic help — so-called ‘squeezas” — and this is clearly reflected in the video. I have discussed the matter with black friends and colleagues and they were puzzled about the fuss. — Happy in the new SA but perplexed

Students who reject integration should leave South Africa. — Vester Sibuye, Johannesburg

On Friday I checked the reaction on Afrikaans websites. On Litnet there was an apology to blacks on behalf of Afrikaners and in another piece a likening of the students’ actions to the recent killings at Skielik. One correspondent to Volksblad angrily announced his resignation as a UFS alumnus and accused the Reitz students of silent complicity. He also mentioned the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

Would the reactions have been significantly different if, as happened at Skielik, people actually died? It’s as if the racial flag, once hoisted, blurs our ability to discriminate. — Jaco Alant

This incident shows how long it will take before certain South Africans accept that we are all equal irrespective of skin colour. Let justice be done. Our Constitution is not just a piece of paper. — Ohentse Mokae, CPUT student

As a white foreigner who once lived in Umlazi, I find it perplexing that many white South Africans are saying: ‘Why all the attention on the video and racism when there are bigger issues such as crime?” Many blacks are fed up with the general superiority complex of white South Africans. If all were truly treated as equals and racism ended, crime rates would probably drop. — Mitch

When I graduated from UFS in 1981, Reitz hostel was already a home to troublemakers. My friends and I were regularly subjected to verbal abuse simply for passing the residence.

I totally reject what happened at Reitz, but wonder whether this tragic incident was the result of years of undisciplined behaviour by residents. No university should allow such behaviour over such a period as it will result in extremism sooner or later. — Hermène Koorts, DA MPL

Why are institutions of higher learning left to so-called ‘academics” to use as their private spaza shops? Why is it that, after 14 years of so-called freedom, UFS is only now integrating its residences? The government should stop focusing on areas that are meaningless to most South Africans, such as reform in rugby, quotas in cricket and pledges. Nobody really cares about that nonsense. What we want is real empowerment through education. — Siba, Randburg

I have heard the excuses before. Didn’t someone say 32 years ago: ‘Dit laat my koud [It leaves me cold]”? Now I hear the same echo in a free South Africa: the ‘innocent” students were merely ‘play-acting”. I support a class action against the students and a damages claim against the university. We ignore this simmering cauldron at our great peril. — Mothobi Mutloatse, Johannesburg

A case of paean envy

Peter Vale and Jonathan Carter (February 29) have their knickers in a twist because the Institute of Security Studies was called a leading global think tank. But rather than do serious research and publish a critique of the think tank’s survey metho­dology and analysis in an accredited academic journal, they indulge in a rave about all think tanks, labelling them ‘enemies of the people” oops, I mean ‘neo-liberal” (the catch-all charge to silence opponents).

I don’t know why The EDGE Institute is on their list, but they didn’t call us or look at our website. Our economic policy focus is obvious from the slightest acquaintance with our work, yet they suggest we focus on social issues.

They say our funding is ‘not explicit”. In fact, we receive no core funding — funds not tied to a specific project. Our partners include the London Business School, the New School for Social Research, local and foreign government departments and multilaterals including the World Bank, Unctad and the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

We host public debates in Johannesburg together with the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust and Wits’ Sociology of Work Programme. Maybe unfocused, but hardly neo-liberal or ‘intent on embedding particular policy outcomes”.

We publish extensively in mainstream academic books and journals, which our intrepid truth-seekers see as the sole repository of ‘serious scholarship”. Really? Our universities are a mixed bag of quality researchers, private consultants earning lots on the side and lazy buggers who do no research.

What about the HSRC? Far bigger than any think tank with staff seen as knowledgeable on topics from Aids to think tanks. But is it different from a huge consultancy?

I hope Vale and Carter get over what looks like a bad case of paean envy. — Stephen Gelb, executive director, The EDGE Institute

Outrageous and unscientific

”Women die when abortion’s restricted” (February 29) correctly describes the right-wing American agenda that is infiltrating South Africa in challenging provisions upholding women’s rights, particularly to abortion.

At the recent hearings, anti-choice Christian groups made unscientific claims that abortions cause breast cancer and depression. These were countered by local academics who pointed to holes and bias in the research cited.

On its website the Christian Medical Fellowship urges health interns to submit a signed declaration to their employers that they object to performing abortions and will not be trained to do so. The declaration they are being asked to sign is not legally defensible and the issue has been referred to the Health Department and the Health Professions Council.

With regard to conscientious objection, chair of Parliament’s health committee James Ngculu noted before the recent enactment of the abortion legislation: ‘We must always move from the premise that those who conduct abortions … go by their own choice to the profession. No one is compelled to be a doctor; no one is compelled to be a nurse; no one is compelled to be a midwife.

‘How then, when you determine your own profession, do you think there must be a conscientious objection? It is disingenuous and manipulative for the opposition to put this particular view.”

The Hospital Christian Fellowship and the Christian Medical Fellowship had nothing to say about human rights abuses under apartheid. They were silent when family planning was enforced, and when the Abortion and Sterilisation Act of 1975 was implemented because it benefited the few privileged women in South Africa.

As Christians, we received no inspiration or comfort from these groups, and many of us soon left them. We draw inspiration from Christ Jesus sitting with sex workers, listening to them and being alongside them.

This is the Christianity that we need, not one detached from ordinary women and their lives. Health workers need to focus on building the health system, not undermining it. — Marion Stevens, Reproductive Rights Alliance, Cape Town

PAC is tainted by greed

Siphiwe Sesanti‘s assertion that PAC leaders ‘are not yet tainted by a culture of greed” is dishonest (February 22). The PAC’s problems in post-apartheid South Africa are a direct result of this ‘culture of greed”.

The root cause of the PAC’s ever-declining support is fighting among its leaders over positions, their character assassination of each other in the media, unnecessary legal disputes and constant embezzlement of party funds for personal gain.

Consider Motsoko Pheko’s unlawful transactions from the Sobukwe Fund and Letlapa Mphahlele’s decision to suspend the party’s constitution and rule by decree.

To expect the PAC to produce leaders of high moral standing is mere daydreaming. So far, only the DA has shown the potential to produce leaders with high respect for ethical governance. The less said about the ANC’s leaders and their morals the better.

The PAC’s leaders have failed to master conflict management and to deal effectively with diverse political views within their ranks.

Instead of seeking solutions for the party’s chronic instability, they have continuously resorted to divisive infighting in their pursuit of personal power.

I pity Robert Sobukwe’s soul; the party he so diligently built has been reduced into an arena for power jostling fuelled by avarice. I pity Thami ka Plaatjie, who seems to be the only leader with the correct diagnosis and medication for the PAC’s illnesses. — Homeboy Mmoba

Offensive term

As a Zimbabwean I was offended by the use of the term makwerekwere in last week’s article on Carla Bruni. For a respectable paper to use this term can only strengthen the view that there is nothing wrong with xenophobic language.

Foreigners, and especially refugees, are having a torrid time. Police brutally and illegally raided refugees in a Johannesburg church; the magistrate handled the arrested people in a xenophobic way; a refugee was refused treatment at Tygerberg Hospital. Bear in mind, also, the treatment of Somalis.

You owe your Zimbabwean proprietor and other foreigners in South Africa an apology. — Regis Mtutu, Muizenberg

In brief

The purging of Thabo Mbeki’s allies in Cosatu has begun. Willie Madisha’s sin was to expose the misuse of a Cosatu credit card by Zwe­linzima Vavi and to support Charles Modise’s statement that he (Modise) donated R500 000 to the SACP. Worse, he appeared on the Mbeki list at Polokwane. Dictatorship does not announce its arrival; it imposes itself. — Zeph Cele, Port Shepstone

You ask why Vavi is such a keen Jacob Zuma supporter when he says he does not intend joining government. That doesn’t mean much; after all, on April 3 2001 Zuma said in a press statement: ‘I have no intention or desire to stand for the position of president.” — Rob Isted, Muizenberg

Fikile-Ntsikilelo Moya’s article on the K-word can be described with yet another very descriptive K-word. Kak. — Spike Kunene

Seven thousand miners face being dumped on the unemployment pile, casualties of the electricity crisis. Shutting down the electricity of voracious aluminium plants would solve the problem at a stroke. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to California’s electricity crisis several years ago by doing precisely that. — Suzanne Hotz

Asked in Parliament if he had ever met Alan Thetard, Zuma said ‘no” under oath. Why is he now objecting to the use of Alan Thetard’s diary as evidence? — Martin Blose

”Why the FBJ exists” (February 29). Ag, shame man, pass the Kleenex. — Bruce Cooper