Disgraced former African National Congress (ANC) spokesperson Carl Niehaus obtained top marks while a student at the University of South Africa, one of his professors has written in a letter to the Beeld newspaper.
”For the honours degree, he won the dean’s medal with the highest marks for the [Bachelor of Theology with honours] for that year,” wrote Willem Saayman, emeritus professor in the department of missionary science at Unisa.
Unisa confirmed earlier this month that Niehaus obtained his Bachelor of Honours degree and honours degree in theology (summa cum laude) in 1986 while serving seven-and-a-half years of a 15-year sentence for high treason.
He resigned from his position in the party, but not as a member, last week amid allegations that he was deeply in debt, had lied about, among other things, his qualifications and had forged signatures on official documents while working at the Gauteng Economic Development Agency.
According to his attorney Ian Small Smith, Niehaus’s ”time spent in prison for his principled opposition to apartheid” was to blame for his woes.
In his letter published in Beeld on Monday, Saayman said Niehaus was at a reasonably advanced stage in his dissertation for the master’s degree in theology when he suspended his studies to work full-time for the ANC.
Although Niehaus’s online CV stated that he had received his Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983, Wits denied the claim and said that although he was a student at the university, he did not graduate.
Niehaus’s CV on the LitNet website also stated that he received his ”doctorate” in theology (summa cum laude) from the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands while he was ambassador.
But Beeld last week reported that Niehaus did not get the doctor’s degree in theology from the university, as he had claimed. This was during his stint as South Africa’s ambassador in Den Haag.
”I can inform you that Mr Carl Niehaus did not attain a doctor’s degree in theology at the University of Utrecht,” a university representative informed Beeld. — Sapa