/ 23 June 2017

Letters to the editor: June 23 to 29 2017

Driven to despair: Professor Xolela Mangcu has first-hand experience of racism at the University of Cape Town and writes that the time may have come for a chapter nine institution to remedy the situation.
Driven to despair: Professor Xolela Mangcu has first-hand experience of racism at the University of Cape Town and writes that the time may have come for a chapter nine institution to remedy the situation.

Black profs in a Catch-22

I was heart-broken reading Neo Ramoupi’s article on higher education (“Why are there so few black profs?”). If a black guy with a PhD from Howard University cannot get a job with our universities, then who is qualified – white academics with hardly his international experience and recognition?

It is all too common in our country for white academics to spend their entire academic careers in one institution – from undergraduate to full professor and head of department – and still reject internationally respected black academics. Some of these very same white academics are the first people to raise the meritocracy card, even though they got to where they are as beneficiaries of the largest affirmative action for white people in the history of the world.

When I applied to study law at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983, I was denied the government permit required to study at a white university. I finally got in through a technicality when the quota system was introduced in 1984. I then joined a class of white kids who got into Wits because they were legally protected from competition with 90% of the students in the country. Would those white kids have become the lawyers and professors that they ultimately became if they had received competition from the hot-shot black students who were passing with As in township schools but legally prohibited from coming to Wits?

We cannot say for certain, because we cannot answer counterfactuals. But we can make logical inferences, one of which is that any system that is built on exclusion is bound to be suboptimal. The system will continue to be suboptimal for as long as black academics do not have a sense of ownership of our universities.

To make matters worse, we have white alumni who influence the direction of the universities from the grave, including what we teach. That is the worst way to think about a university as a site of knowledge production.

So Ramoupi is right to advise the minister to ask the right question, which is not what holds black academics back but why they leave the system. And, by the way, the exit of senior black academics is not a problem limited to junior academics, and it is not just a matter of them chasing greener pastures.

The racism I have experienced from my white colleagues at the University of Cape Town has driven me to despair, whether it is being mistaken for a delivery boy or being told to go to the students’ bathroom or being policed by colleagues who have absolutely no authority over me. These things are known to our universities but nobody does anything about them, let alone pick up the phone to find out. The experiences are either explained away or covered up.

And so, if you are a black academic, even at the level of full professor, you are damned if you stay and damned if you don’t. Staying means putting up with the bigotry; leaving means ceding the space to the bigotry. Just as free education is beyond the capacity of the individual institutions, rooting out racism that drives black academics away cannot be solved by individual institutions.

I cannot help but think that the issue is even bigger than the minister of higher education: the systematic exclusion of black academics from our universities cannot be consistent with the letter and spirit of our Constitution.

The time may have come, or even long passed, for a chapter nine institution to remedy this situation. If we can have such an institution for broadcasting and for the promotion of languages, why should we not have them for arguably the most vital sector of our society – the universities. Like all other chapter nine institutions, the new body would not be accountable to the government of the day but to Parliament and protected by our much-celebrated Constitution. – Professor Xolela Mangcu, University of Cape Town


Do the right thing and remove Zuma

South Africa is in desperate need of leaders who are willing to put the interests of the country first. It has become apparent that the internal structures of the ANC have failed the people by not resolving this leadership delinquency.

The citizens of South Africa are looking at those in authority to remedy the situation and rescue the country from this outright threat.

History will ask us what our answer was when all this was happening. History will judge what we did or did not do when the country was under threat. History will call us to account for our actions in handling this predicament caused by ignorance and the arrogance of some of our leaders.

We must not be ignorant of the fact that those who are benefiting from corruption will say and do anything to create doubt in unsuspecting minds; they will try to shift attention from this issue.

To those who have pocketed or are pocketing from selling our country, shame on you. Only a fool sells their inheritance and that of their children.

Leaders, we are appealing to your moral consciousness and sense of duty to do the right thing and vote for the removal of Comrade Jacob Zuma as the president of South Africa.

Let us stand and be counted. – Jabulani


Architects council does not understand the profession

The article “‘Old guard’ architects resisting change” has got a lot wrong with it. It was written in response to an earlier article in the Mail & Guardian, “Architects face up to bullying council”, which was unfortunately published under the heading of News when it should have appeared under Comment & Analysis.

Clearly prepared on behalf of the Council of the South African Council for the Architectural Profession (Sacap), it rehashes earlier press releases. It amounts to a denial of the various claims made by Architects for Change (A4C), claims there is no evidence and further adds an innuendo of racism. It is just not good enough.

Sacap’s Annual Report of 2015-2016 contains enough evidence of poor management and maladministration to give cause for great concern, hence the petition and letters to the minister of public works.

In one year, the finances of the council have gone from a surplus of R3 434 784 to a deficit of R1&nsbp;231 578. One needs to remember that the only source of income is the licence fees of about 10 000 registered persons.

This deficit is mainly the result of the doubling of the remuneration of “top management”, a significant increase in staff, and the relocation of the offices to accommodate this bloated bureaucracy. This article attempts to brush this aside on the grounds that an outside agency had considered the remuneration of the staff. It refuses to explain how the registrar of an organisation regulating a mere 10 000 persons can warrant an annual remuneration of R2.5-million a year and the deputy R1.5-million.

These positions are administrative. They require no special (or rare) skills. Neither incumbent is qualified in the profession they purport to regulate. The job just isn’t worth that amount of money and, quite frankly, the council does not collect enough to afford it.

Furthermore, about half of the council positions are vacant – something A4C (to whom I am not aligned) and the various voluntary associations such as the institute had to find out for themselves. It severely affects the legitimacy and credibility of the council.

Instead of addressing the concerns expressed in the petition, echoed by prominent members of the profession, the council has consistently either ignored them or lashed out against their critics when they couldn’t, blustering as bullies do. The June 9 reply shows that the council fails to understand the profession it is supposed to regulate, ostensibly to protect the public against inappropriate conduct by members of the profession.

No one becomes an architect by accident. It requires an unusual and broad outlook, with an understanding of diverse disciplines, including mathematics, physics, materials, history, art, building services, design, and law. It takes years of dedication, effort, and talent (a bit like the Allan Gray advertisement featuring a ballerina – it takes 20 years to perform Swan Lake).

To become an architect requires a very good matric, five years of dedicated academic training at a university with a very full programme and two years successful pupillage, before you can register in your own right. It requires passion to overcome all the obstacles and reverses. It is its own reward, because it pays poorly considering the level of knowledge, expertise, experience and exposure to risk and liability required.

These are the people of the “old guard” that Sacap’s article refers to with disapproval. They are not resisting change, as Sacap would have it – they are resisting the erosion of standards.

Before the Architectural Professions Act 44 of 2000, qualified people were the only people subject to regulation. Anyone else could very much do what they could get away with.

The Act attempts to regulate the work of all persons active in the sphere of providing what is broadly referred to as architectural services. It identifies four categories of persons within this sphere, without actually identifying the minimum level of skill required for each category. Section 26 of the Act specifically tasked the council with putting this in place, generally referred to the “identification of work”. The Council has singularly failed this obligation, and is now trying to blame the Competition Commission for its failure.

Sacap purports to have created a programme that would permit a person to migrate from one category to the next, merely by being there. In the present context this is irrelevant, because any registered persons in any category may do any architectural work, as long as they comply with rule 2 of the code of conduct. This requires that registered persons do not stray from their level of expertise. It is not clear how this is to be determined and enforced without the guidance of a promulgated identity of works, and seems to be left to the discretion of the registered person.

It amounts to a system of self-identifying your level of expertise – the very thing that the regulation of a profession is aimed at avoiding.

The outcome of this Act, and the lack of application by the council that is supposed to have implemented it, is that the various levels of expertise are conflated to the point that no one can (or may) tell the difference between a draftsman and a professional architect, least of all the council and the local authorities.

There is thus no protection or guidance for the public in terms of the standard of service it may expect from an architectural professional. The whole point of this legislation is lost and the council serves no purpose. The president and registrar may huff and puff as much as they like; there is no longer a house to blow down. – John Doe, architect, Cape Town