A brief summation of the origins, evolution and current status of South African universities

‘The Minister has instructed us to give you a bodyguard; the guard will come from the group that provided security to President Mandela.’ The announcement landed with a thud, made worse by the fact that someone thought a simple professor from the University of Pretoria needed to know the elite security stable from which his protection was to come. Why would the administrator of a troubled university need armed bodyguards?

My initial reaction was to resist. After all, I had grown up on the rough streets of the Cape Flats and had seen my fair share of ruthless gangsters; ‘I can handle this,’ I tried to reassure myself. But the minister's envoy made it clear that this was not something to be negotiated. I would have a bodyguard.

Late that night, as I finished work on the main campus of the Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT) in the township of Umlazi, the armed guard was waiting outside my fortified office. I was tense on the short trip of about 18 kilometres to my hotel on the Durban beachfront. ‘Wait outside please,’ ordered the guard as he walked through my hotel room, checking cupboards and lifting lampshades. After a few minutes, I was allowed in and ordered to double-lock the door. I fell on the bed emotionally exhausted.

Then a strange realisation came to me as I reflected on the situation. This was wrong. As a scholar, I treasure the idea of a university as a place where one is free to think and to act in accordance with academic values. The notion of being accompanied by armed guards onto and off campus was inimical to the very idea of a university. I was disturbed about what this unwanted security detachment would signal to the community of students and academics whom I was expected to lead out of trouble. For the first time it hit me: this might not be a university after all, only an organisation in which staff came to earn a living and students came to obtain a certificate that might one day earn them a decent income. The routines of administration were certainly there – registration, instruction, examination, graduation – but the true essence of a university was not at all evident in those moments, and even less so as I entered the belly of the institutional beast.

Remuneration of university council members, 2020 (overall per university and individually per meeting)

In the early months of South Africa's democracy, there was a significant confrontation between the nascent ministry of education, which sets policy, and the government department that executes it. The word in the air was ‘bailout’. It was painfully obvious that there were well-endowed white universities with world-class infrastructures, highly rated scientists and impressive financial reserves accumulated in the apartheid period; at the same time, there were under-resourced black universities with crumbling buildings, mediocre scholars and parlous finances. What made matters worse was that, as the white universities gradually opened up their racially exclusive admissions before the end of apartheid, the top black students deserted their racially designated institutions. This unexpected migration immediately plunged already vulnerable institutions into a major crisis of plummeting student numbers. With a government funding formula that allocated state subsidies largely on the basis of student enrolments, an already precarious situation became depressingly grim.

The minister of education (and his advisers) held the political position that there should be a major bailout of the historically disadvantaged universities to establish some degree of parity with the white institutions advantaged by a century of racial privilege in state funding. A massive bailout would not make all universities equal, by whatever definition, but it would at least provide a solid platform for the rebuilding of black institutions, in keeping with all the promises of reconstruction and development offered by President Nelson Mandela's new government.

The vice-chancellors of the black universities certainly thought a bailout was coming, a massive infusion of redress funding to correct the imbalances and injustices of the past. Banking on relief, university leaders opened access to all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, in the spirit of the new democracy. In a short period of time, the University of Durban-Westville would lose its majority Indian enrolments, and the University of the Western Cape its ‘coloured’ designation, as black African students took their rightful places in these public institutions. Modestto-significant reserves were spent as bursaries on the tens of thousands of poorer students who started to press through the newly opened ‘doors of learning and culture’, so poetically described in the ruling party's Freedom Charter. There was no institutional risk anticipated for the black institutions. The new government would surely bail them out.

At around five fifteen on 22 May 2018, Professor Gregory Kamwendo parked his car outside a flat in Empangeni, a beautifully situated town overlooking the Indian Ocean in the north-eastern part of KwaZulu-Natal. Malawian-born, he was an accomplished scholar in the field of sociolinguistics and dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Zululand (UZ). The man who pumped bullets into Kamwendo's upper body as he sat in the parked car on that fateful Tuesday evening was an inkabi (assassin). He had been hired by a taxi owner, Oscar Mthiyane, who himself had been called out of the blue to arrange the murder. The caller was Selby Nkuna, a one-time lecturer at the University of Zululand. The 53-year-old professor died bleeding in his car as the two men sped away in a getaway car driven by Mthiyane. On 29 November 2018 detectives arrested Mthiyane and Nkuna, and in October 2020 the two killers were sentenced to life in prison.

Why would a university lecturer murder an academic dean? Quite simply, because the dean was disrupting a revenue stream that enriched the lecturer. Kamwendo had exposed a fraudulent PhD operation in which the university allegedly sold poorly printed doctoral diplomas. It did not help that there was already bad blood between the two men because Kamwendo had testified in an arbitration case against Nkuna for physically assaulting a student. Nkuna had threatened to send Kamwendo ‘back to Malawi in a coffin’. The murder took place in the context of institutional dysfunction, as one statement so poignantly captured: ‘In grieving the loss of a man of such principle and integrity, we call for justice, not just in prosecuting his murderers but in addressing the institutional and system-level dynamics that his murder draws attention to.’

INSTITUTIONALISED CORRUPTION OF THE ACADEMIC ENTERPRISE

The PhD scandal was matched by a much bigger case of certificate fraud at UZ in 2016. An investigation there showed that as many as 4 000 people might have paid for their degrees over a period of twenty years. Between 400 and 500 of those certificates appeared to involve teaching qualifications. In one instance, five staff members made R260 000 selling 15 fake degrees. About 80 students were deregistered after it was found they did not even have matric (school-leaving) certificates.

Income streams by institutional type (2020)

Nthabiseng Ogude was the talented new deputy vice-chancellor of a recently merged university on the east coast of South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU). Its organisational core was the established white University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), which had merged with the Port Elizabeth Technikon and incorporated an urban black campus (Vista), together with a smaller campus in George about 350 kilometres away. All eyes were on this young professor of chemistry, one of the first black women to be appointed as a senior executive of a major university.

One evening, a petrol attendant put ordinary petrol in her car's diesel tank, sparking a small crisis. Ogude had to travel to George the next day to officiate at a graduation ceremony of NMMU's Southern Cape campus. She called the vice-chancellor's assistant, who hastily arranged a replacement car from the rental company used by the university for official business. The car was duly delivered, but out of an appreciation for the university's business, the rental company decided to deliver an A-class Mercedes-Benz sedan rather than the basic Toyota-level vehicle normally used for travel – without charging for the upgrade. The vicechancellor, a mild-mannered Christian who was ethical to a fault, was furious when he heard about this break with protocol. He confronted Ogude. Why did she take a rental car when the university gave her a generous car allowance? And why an A-class vehicle when university policy restricted staff to a smaller vehicle at the lower end of the rental car range? While the vice-chancellor had clearly not heard about Ogude's car travails, the message from the top of the university could not have been clearer: integrity mattered.

INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRITY

What happens in low-trust environments when those responsible for managing universities cannot trust one another to act with integrity? The consequence, in a nutshell, is dysfunction. But what is this thing called institutional integrity?

Whereas individual integrity is the practice of honesty and doing the right thing on the part of an individual person who shows consistency in adhering to the values that connect words and actions, institutional integrity refers to ‘an organization that defines and acts within a strong code of ethical conduct and positive values and that adopts no tolerance of attitudes, actions and activities by its employees or partners that deviate from that code’.

THE PUZZLE

In July 2021, a major South African newspaper ran the headline ‘Is the Vaal University of Technology an Institution Bewitched?’ It was a strange question to ask of a modern institution, a premier site of higher learning. Yet a mere few weeks earlier, one of the country's most distinguished academics seemed puzzled during an interview about the campus citizens of another dysfunctional institution: ‘If you were a Zulu, they’d tell you that you can't understand these people, they’ve been bewitched.’ This former vice-chancellor and administrator of universities had seen his fair share of institutional implosion. ‘Bewitched’, in this context, expresses the frustration experienced when we struggle to explain why a university has a high turnover of vice-chancellors, why university councils regularly collapse, and why there is constant campus turmoil or shutdowns because of conflicts, protests and disruptions.

Such chronic dysfunction sometimes attracts the attention of the political head of higher education in government (now the minister of higher education and training), who will often dispatch an assessor to an institution to report on the situation. The assessor's report usually triggers the appointment of an administrator to take over key functions of the university and establish some semblance of order. When, despite ministerial intervention, the university falls back into dysfunction, some do indeed wonder whether the institution is under some spell.

There is no shortage of polemical writings on corruption and mismanagement in these dysfunctional universities. These tend to be exaggerated, self-aggrandising accounts of institutional malfunction, in which the evidence is slim, one-sided or nonexistent. Three book-length publications of note are Nithaya Chetty and Christopher Merrett's The Struggle for the Soul of a South African University (concerning the University of KwaZulu-Natal), Aubrey Mokadi's A Portrait of Governance in Higher Education (about the Vaal University of Technology), and Nhlanhla Maake's Barbarism in Higher Education (documenting the author's travails at the Vaal Triangle campus of what was then Potchefstroom University).

There also exist at least three reviews of assessor reports that seek to extract key findings of value. These are straightforward summaries and extrapolations rather than empirical or theoretical treatments of the subject beyond what was already known. One of these was commissioned by the Council on Higher Education and titled Institutional Governance in the Higher Education System in South Africa.

Independent assessors’ investigations of South African universities

When Sibongile Mani woke up on the morning of 1 June 2017, the undergraduate accounting student from Walter Sisulu University must have thought that all her prayers had been answered. There, popping up in her bank account, was no less than R14 million, rather than the measly R1 400 monthly transfer for meals and books that she received from the state-funded National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).

Instead of reporting the erroneous transfer to her university or the scheme, Mani decided instead to go shopping, spending R820 000 in 73 days on everything from Peruvian wigs to expensive smartphones. The Queenstown grandmother who raised Mani lives in a dilapidated structure and felt that the money could have been better spent: ‘She should have built me a house instead of buying hair and such nonsense.’

To those outside South African universities, several questions must have been raised by the Mani debacle. One had to be the vulnerability of systems that could allow what officials called ‘a technical glitch’ to transfer R14 million of state funding to a student's personal account; indeed, NSFAS only discovered the error more than two months later, on 13 August 2017. Then there is the question of accountability. NSFAS officials said no one was to blame, as the prosecuting authority pondered whether it should make a criminal or civil case. Mani would eventually be found guilty and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for theft. An astute observer of South African society would no doubt consider some pertinent behavioural questions: How many students would have reported the unexpected windfall? How many people in the broader community would be troubled by Mani's behaviour? Her grandmother certainly had other concerns – how to spend the money properly!

The corruptibility of NSFAS as a multibillion-rand resource would surely have exercised the public mind. The diversion of the R14 million to student Mani was no technical glitch, a senior administrator at NSFAS assured me; ‘they made the mistake of diverting it to the wrong account’. Evidence at hand shows how NSFAS funds, distributed through a private company called Intellimali, could be hacked, as a note sent by them to the authorities made clear: ‘This is evidence that students intelli account are [sic] are being hacked. Student from unisa [University of South Africa] details have been changed into wsu [Walter Sisulu University] students. And the money was taken off. Kindly look at that.