In August, minister of education
Sibusiso Bengu appointed Professor Jaap Durand, former deputy
vice-chancellor of the University of the Western Cape, as an
independent assessor to advise him on “the source and nature of
discontent” at the Vaal Triangle Technikon (VTT) and on “steps required
to restore proper governance”. Its rector, Aubrey Mokadi has been
suspended for nearly a year accused of serious abuse of technikon funds
and in April a student riot resulted in extensive damage and
theft.
After a brief but intensive visit, Professor Durand duly recommended
that:
- the technikon council should be advised to complete the
disciplinary process against the suspended rector as quickly as
possible;
- all retirements in terms of the current over-generous early
retirement scheme should cease;
- a court interdict against student gatherings on the campus should
be lifted;
- the council should appoint a chief executive officer for the
technikon until clarity is reached about the position of the suspended
rector, so that the council can cease to involve itself in the
day-to-day running of the institution;
- the technikon statutes should be changed in line with requirements
of the Higher Education Act. This would require that the council should
dissolve and be replaced by a newly constituted council.
The 1997 Higher Education Act provides the minister with very
extensive powers against tertiary institutions that do not accept his
recommendations including the ability to amalgamate or close
universities and technikons as well as the power to withhold subsidies.
Bengu has twice threatened to withdraw the Vaal Triangle Technikon’s
subsidy. On Friday September 11, after briefly contemplating legal
action against the minister, the council appeared to back down and to
be about to accept Professor Durand’s recommendations. By Monday, six
members of the 25-strong council had resigned — five in support of the
Durand report, the sixth, Godfrey Shishana, from disgust at what he
perceived as ministerial blackmail, disregard for institutional
autonomy and ANC interference. Since these resignations the council has
intensified its defiance of the minister and rejected the Durand
report. They claim that the report “was inconclusive and at best based
on vague assumptions and perceptions. At worst it is completely devoid
of any accurate facts.”
At first sight this appears to be a simple story of the education
minister flexing his newly-acquired muscles against a wayward and
reactionary tertiary institution that had suspended its new black
rector, was attempting to suppress student politics and had doled out
too many generous golden handshakes to its old guard. Beneath this
smooth surface, though, lies an extraordinary and highly complex
situation. The essential elements of the story involve the rapid
transformation of a diehard Afrikaner institution, an unlikely alliance
of black and white staff, an ambitious ANC-aligned rector in a
predominantly PAC institution, and a body of disadvantaged students
suffering huge social and educational stress.
The most striking instance of the discontent which Professor Durand
was instructed to investigate occurred in April, when students at the
technikon held a protest about the quality of the food technology
course offered there. Students were apparently concerned that the
skills taught in this course were not sufficiently market-related and
that the course was not nationally accredited. The protest developed
into a large-scale riot. The administration block was vandalised. Some
students and opportunist non-student criminals made off with a large
number of computers and stole the contents of the canteen tills,
assaulting the cashiers in the process. The damage and loss were
estimated by the technikon authorities at well over R300 000. Eighteen
students were arrested and charged with theft and vandalism (their
criminal cases are still pending) and a considerable proportion of the
stolen property was recovered during a search of the student
hostels.
The disturbances also had a racist edge. Several white lecturers and
administrators associated with the food technology course and the
financial administration of the technikon were forcibly put on a bus
and driven out of the campus. Two of the three most senior managers,
the vice-rectors for administration and student affairs, Professor Isak
Steyn and Dr Ravi Nayagar, were separately abducted in a van. However,
police freed them all at the gates of the technikon. The management
immediately closed the institution, cancelled scheduled graduations and
required students living in residences to vacate them until further
notice. It also obtained a court interdict forbidding student
gatherings of any sort except for classes.
In the days that followed the SRC, which this year is controlled by
Pasma (the Pan-Africanist Student Movement of Azania, the PAC’s newly
founded tertiary student organization) said that it did not condone
“any criminal activity” and that, in any case, it was in a meeting when
the trouble started. Pasma condemned the violence and refused to
provide bail for arrested members. The local PAC chimed in, asserting
its non-racial character. The ANC-aligned student organization, Sasco,
joined in the condemnations and blamed the SRC for not acting quickly
to control the riot. Significantly, though, Sasco and the technikon’s
Nehawu branch also called for the reinstatement of the suspended rector
of the technikon, Professor Aubrey Mokadi.
The students’ present discontents and occasionally violent behaviour
can only be understood in the context of the past. The technikon was
founded in 1966 in Vanderbijlpark, a model dormitory town for Iskor’s
white workers that now exists as a tract of predominantly white
suburbia wedged uneasily between the enormous Iskor plant and some of
the most famous townships in South Africa’s modern history:
Sharpeville, Sebokeng and Boipatong. The technikon’s students and
academic staff were all white and almost all Afrikaners, its medium of
instruction was Afrikaans and its purpose was to train skilled workers
for jobs at Iskor and in the Free State goldfield towns on the south
side of the river. Many of the original lecturers and administrators
are still employed by the technikon, where 20-year-long service
certificates are not uncommon.
By 1992 blacks made up roughly 15 per cent of students at the
Vanderbijlpark campus. The senior management of the technikon seems to
have viewed this not as a precursor of things to come but as a problem
of controlling a recalcitrant minority. For this purpose, they
recruited Professor Kotie Grové, previously of the University of Port
Elizabeth, as dean of students. On his arrival at the technikon, he was
shown a videotape by members of the management which, he was told,
would “indicate very clearly and immediately. . . who the guys among
the blacks are. . . causing all the problems.” In fact, he proved to be
the Trojan horse of change. In the area under his control, student
affairs, he began to recruit black members of staff. The SRC was
temporarily abolished and replaced by a student transformation forum of
four black and four white members.
These changes no doubt created a more welcoming atmosphere for black
students who grew in confidence as well as numbers. By 1994 blacks made
up roughly half the student population. They were, though, a very
discontented half. They complained that:
- instruction continued to take place in Afrikaans and lecturers
showed little concern for the problems specific to black students
- the food in the canteen was of poor quality;
- the political leaders of white student opinion had easy access to
the rector, Professor Pieter Du Plessis, while black students found it
very difficult to gain a hearing;
- white students were in general standoffish or openly hostile;
- there were strong rumours in the air of corruption in high places
and the misuse of funds.
These circumstances all chafed upon a
highly politicised generation of black students for whom barricaded
streets and the Boipatong massacre were fresh memories. The spark came
in early 1995, when a group of white students declared a section of one
residence to be off-limits for blacks or, as they called it, a
Volkstaat or AWB hostel.
In February 1995, the technikon featured in the television news on
several occasions and was the subject of a documentary in the Beckett’s
Trek series. The administration block was seriously vandalised, student
gangs roamed about the campus at night fighting in groups and
assaulting individuals. For several days, crowds of armed black and
white students confronted each other and the police on the technikon’s
large but rather bleak lawns. Stones were thrown and insults hurled.
The students on either side of the racial barrier viewed each other, as
Denis Beckett found, through a mist of hysteria, machismo and
alcohol.
The rector appealed in vain for calm and declared that he was prepared
to accept an inquiry into student concerns. Asked to comment on the
accusations against him of corruption and mismanagement, he denied any
impropriety but said that he would prefer not to comment in any detail
until the accusations had been formally presented to him. Professor Du
Plessis proved to be wise in his reticence. A commission of inquiry
conducted by Advocate Johann Gautchi found that “the conduct of the
Rector. . . demonstrated a lack of competence rendering him unfit. . .
to hold the office of Rector. . . and justifying dismissal.”
This was not an entirely surprising finding. Professor Du Plessis had,
most remarkably, been appointed rector at the Vaal Triangle after his
dismissal on similar grounds as vice-chancellor of the University of
Venda. As vice-chancellor of Venda, Du Plessis had been known for his
supine compliance with student demands and his all-night drinking
sessions with student leaders. (See Focus 11, July 1998.) At the Vaal
Triangle Technikon, his behaviour changed to some extent. Now, it
appears from the Gautchi report, his drinking became more solitary in
nature and his favoritism towards student leaders became more narrowly
focused on whites only. It seemed very likely to the commission that he
had actually encouraged right-wing student leaders in their hostility
to blacks. He had permitted “serious deficiencies in the administration
and management of the technikon.” It was proved that Du Plessis had
made “unauthorised and irregular use” of technikon funds to renovate
his private house, but it was not possible to follow the paper trail
further and much more serious accusations of corruption relating to the
management of the canteen were not proven. Disciplinary hearings
against Professor Du Plessis and his closest colleague, Dr Kempen, were
begun.
It was clear to everyone involved, which included an increasingly
concerned and interventionist education ministry that a new and more
representative technikon council had to be created. The council was
duly reformed to represent the ministry, local and business interests,
and all levels of technikon staff. Equally important was to find a head
for this council. Given the new government, the militancy of the black
students, and the way the previous administration had behaved, this had
to be a black person. It was therefore fortunate that someone who
seemed perfect for the job was at hand: Aubrey Mokadi, who was
appointed chairman of the transformed technikon council in August
1995.
Although only 35, Mokadi had already had a varied career in
universities, politics and business. Born and raised in the Vaal
Triangle, he was a student at Fort Hare. In 1987, he took English
Honours at Wits and then taught at Bophuthatswana and Vista
universities. While at Vista, he obtained an MA from Unisa and
continues to work on a Wits PhD. He had also become an important figure
in local ANC-aligned politics, having been first chairman of the Vaal
Civic. He was, and has continued to be, deeply involved in local
education organisations, including the Vaal Career College (of which he
is chairman) and the Vaal Education Transformation Forum - positions
which involved him in troubleshooting instances of racial tension at
the technikon in 1993-4. Mokadi had also had a brief but significant
experience of senior non-academic employment. After leaving Vista, he
was appointed to Iskor’s RDP office, where he worked until he was
appointed rector at the technikon.
The events of February 1995 proved to be the last stand of white
supremacist attitudes at the technikon. But far more than that changed.
Courses began to be taught in English as well as Afrikaans, and
Afrikaans will shortly cease entirely to be a medium of instruction.
White student numbers have fallen rapidly to 18 per cent this year and
this minority is not a political or cultural force on the campus. The
days of khaki-clad aggression seem ancient history. There is no visible
tension between black and white students but, as at so many other South
African educational institutions, there is very little genuine social
contact either.
The black students at VTT, like most of their peers at South Africa’s
tertiary institutions, are under a great deal of pressure from a number
of sources. With the exception of the ineffably relaxed young members
of the African elite to be found on the Wits or UCT campuses, black
students are still very often their family’s first and only chance of a
way out of poverty. On their success in passing exams (in what is often
a third language) depend their grandparents’ medical care and their
siblings’ and childrens’ schooling. They are also often under pressure
to send cash saved from their bursaries to their families. Even at
institutions, such as VTT, where student debt to the institution is not
a major problem because of relatively wide bursary coverage, students
continue to be under serious economic pressure of an agonisingly
personal kind. The choice between a useful textbook and money sent home
is easy to predict, but bad for the students’ chances of success.
Students, then, are often very poor and very tense. Some subsist on
breakfast cereal. Others are more quickly recognised by their
unchanging clothes than by their faces. Sexual promiscuity is
widespread and so are sexually transmitted diseases. Aids has not yet
been acknowledged as a problem at the technikon, but the first Aids
deaths in residence are already rumoured to have occurred. There is
said to be a lot of heavy drinking, not all of the cheery,
after-hours-in-the-bar variety. It is no wonder that political
demonstrations such as the one that occurred in April are so quickly
capable of degenerating into destructive, vengeful, racist riots.
When the new council and its chairman, Mokadi, were installed, they
found themselves at the head of a hybrid institution. In student
numbers and, unquestionably in student culture and politics, they found
a situation similar to that of other historically disadvantaged
institutions. This did not apply, though, to the physical structure of
the technikon, which is certainly more than adequate, or to the
teaching staff. For, although the academics resembled their colleagues
at the former bantustan universities in being predominantly Afrikaners,
they differed from them in having had very little previous experience
of classroom or social interaction with black people.
The new council, apparently largely at Mokadi’s urging, treated
Professor Du Plessis and his closest associate with great forbearance.
During his suspension, Du Plessis retained his salary and privileges.
In January 1996, he was allowed to take early retirement, complete with
the usual package of benefits. Dr Kempen simply resigned and the
accusations against him were not pursued. Now the management of the
technikon, still largely comprised of white Afrikaner males, was
instructed to turn its attention to cultural and demographic
transformation of the institution. They set to their task with
considerable thoroughness and enthusiasm putting together a
comprehensive package of reforms. This included a transformation
charter, a detailed transformation plan and a sweeping and well-defined
affirmative action policy. But although there were several appointments
of black people to middle-ranking and senior administrative positions,
in general transformation activity remained in the realm of
ideas.
The council needed, of course, to find a new rector. A personnel
consultancy was hired and a short-list drawn up. In an unexpected
development this list included the name of the council’s own chairman,
Aubrey Mokadi. After he had duly resigned his position, the council
voted upon the candidates and elected him rector. Putting aside the —
as yet completely unsubstantiated — rumours that some of the electors
were influenced by factors other than merit, it remains an odd decision
for the council to have made and an even odder one for Mokadi to have
permitted.
As a senior RDP officer in the dominant industry in Vanderbijlpark, he
had all the local influence he could reasonably desire. He was a past
chairman of an important local ANC-aligned structure. He was one of the
biggest fish in the Vaal Triangle’s political and economic pond. For
these reasons he was at least a defensible and, from an education
ministry and ANC perspective, a very good choice as chairman of the
technikon council. The position gave him a considerable amount of power
to guide the technikon in the directions he wished without concerning
himself too closely with everyday administration. This is why his
decision to take the step — formally a downward one — of becoming
rector is hard to understand. He was still young, with a Master’s
degree in English literature, some experience as a fairly junior
teaching member of university English departments and a year in a big
corporation. On the face of it, he was not well qualified to be rector
of a large (12 000 students) tertiary institution focused exclusively
on technical education. No doubt the choice available to the technikon
was restricted by South Africa’s realpolitik to non-white applicants.
Nevertheless, the shortage of black administrators is not so acute that
there cannot have been better qualified candidates. It looks very much
as if the academic in Mokadi combined with the local bigwig to persuade
himself and others that he was the right choice for the job.
In the brief period between his appointment in July 1996 and his
suspension on October 31 1997, Professor Mokadi proved to be very good
at some aspects of his new job. He was undoubtedly very energetic and
hard-working, full of innovative and ambitious ideas, a setter of high
standards. He is said regularly to have worked a 16-hour day and to
have required his immediate colleagues to do the same. He disapproved
of the tendency of the technikon staff to leave work very early on
Friday afternoons.
His greatest strength, though, was the confidence and insight with
which he handled the students. Of all the senior employees at the
technikon, it was Mokadi who best understood their background and
politics. He put his position on student affairs in two newspaper
interviews conducted around the time of his appointment. Students were
to be consulted, to be kept fully informed, but, “in the end, it is
management that has to take decisions”. He also saw and, more
unusually, was prepared publicly to state that student demonstrations
often had less to do with the specific issue which had sparked them off
than with anxiety about “funding, accommodation, fees and access”.
Having been a struggle-era politician himself, he was not easily
impressed or intimidated by students’ tactics. He recalls that when he
heard students singing and toyi-toyi-ing in the corridors of the
administration block, he could be certain that they were not heading
for his office. They knew that a demonstration of that sort would not
impress him in the slightest. He proposed to turn student energies into
more productive courses. He went about the residences holding braais
and suggesting, for example, that the SRC mobilise students to design,
build and decorate a pedestrian bridge over a busy road near the
campus. From someone less well-rooted in local black communities, such
a suggestion would seem insufferably patronising. For Mokadi, it was
possible — and that is no small thing.
Professor Mokadi, however, appears to have overreached himself in
other spheres. He proposed, for example, to transform his technikon
into a university of technology and what he had in mind went well
beyond a cosmetic makeover. He envisaged his institution as a centre of
excellence in scientific and technical education, linked by student and
staff exchange programmes to foreign technical universities and
producing original research. This plan ignored the fact that the
teaching staff has no research experience; that the library has only
33,000 books (to put this in perspective it is less than half of 1 per
cent of books in the Wits library system), and that its laboratories
are not equipped to university standard. Nevertheless, Mokadi
established a new directorate to encourage, direct and fund research
with the goal of ensuring that 50 per cent of the technikon’s staff
would be involved in research projects within five years. His
announcement not only embarrassed the technikon administration, it also
displeased the other technikons and the education ministry since any
change of status should first have been agreed by all technikons and
centrally co-ordinated. Mokadi’s decision, as a senior administrator at
the Vaal Triangle puts it, looked arrogant and foolish, like a
declaration of UDI.
On transformation, he was more cautious. Mokadi knew that he “could
never be a black rector in a traditionally white institution and not be
expected to put in black people to the right places”. But his good
sense and what he describes as his “fear of black failure” prevented
him from appointing blacks fast enough to satisfy the black
administrators and activists already on the campus. He was robustly and
explicitly reluctant to risk the administrative and academic capacity
of the technikon in this way.
Instead he resorted to heavy use of talking-shops and symbolism. In
the brief period before his suspension, he conducted a comprehensive
“culture audit” of the technikon, to which all departments and interest
groups were encouraged to contribute their hopes, fears, future visions
and so forth. He held a bosberaad. He took great pains to draw up, with
the full range of consultation, a charter defining the responsibilities
of the rector. He produced, or, as his opponents allege, appropriated
from another source, a transformation charter for the technikon
promising, in gothic script and flowery tones, all things to all
people. Little placards, bearing the rector’s slogan “At our campus,
collegiality must become a way of life” are still displayed in the
administration block.
Considerable sums of money were spent on public relations exercises. A
Day of Acknowledgement was held, at which awards for “friendship,
contribution and commitment” were given to the minister of education,
to Iskor and to a number of other persons whom Mokadi chose to honour.
The rector’s sayings and doings were reported in Tech News, the
technikon’s internal newsletter, in a breathlessly adulatory style,
bizarrely reminiscent of the Soviet press: “History in the making — a
day of triumph” (Professor Mokadi signing the transformation charter) “
‘I have a dream’ says Professor Mokadi”; “ ‘Let us defend democracy’
says Professor Mokadi”. He bolstered himself with an extra title,
choosing to refer to himself as the CEO of the institution. His
opponents also allege that he required his wife to be styled First Lady
of the Vaal Triangle Technikon. In October last year the inaugurations
of Mokadi as rector and Tokyo Sexwale to the honorary position of
chancellor of the technikon were celebrated with great pomp.
Yet within weeks of this ceremony the technikon council suspended
Mokadi and began the series of investigations into his conduct, one
chaired by lawyer Ronald Sutherland, which at the time of going to
press still continue. The council, in classic coup style, decided upon
the suspension while Mokadi was on an overseas trip. He was accused of
having exceeded his travel budget on a series of visits to technical
universities in Britain, the United States and New Zealand and was said
to have used technikon funds to buy his wife a Volkswagen Jetta. He had
also, his accusers claim, a highly autocratic management style, and had
given promotions to favourites rather than on merit or on plausible
affirmative action grounds. By contemporary South African standards,
these are absurdly minor grounds on which to suspend anyone from
anything. But as the suspension has dragged on, the accusations against
him have become more serious. In May, the Vereeniging magistrate’s
court ordered Mokadi to repay R32 000 to the technikon after he had
unilaterally increased his housing allowance from 8 to 14 per cent and
he is also accused of defrauding the technikon’s international
donors.
Undoubtedly Mokadi had been inept, unrealistic and insensitive — and
this had lost him popularity and made him vulnerable to attack. But the
attack derived its real venom and its surprising success from Mokadi’s
misdiagnosis of where power really lay at the technikon. A considerable
majority of the technikon’s staff in all grades from management and
lecturers to the cleaners and ground staff, are members of Nutesa — the
National Union of Technikon Employees of South Africa. Nutesa was
founded in 1996 and has its roots in the old white technikon staff
association. But, as its leader at the Vaal Triangle, Nic Coetzee,
explains, “the members of the staff association felt that the times
called for protection from something more muscular — a full-fledged
union”. What is more, Nutesa realised that if it were to have any real
hope of success, it would have to attract a significant number of black
members. This proved easier than might have been expected. Neither the
white staff nor most of the blacks liked the practical changes Mokadi
was making. His handling of affirmative action was universally felt to
be unsatisfactory. He also wanted everyone to work harder.
The all-white Nutesa leadership of early 1996 approached the PAC’s
affiliated union on campus, Meshawu, and offered not merely an
alliance, but a complete merger and a change of name. This offer, to
what is on other campuses an insignificant minority union, was
perceived as generous. The merger was accepted and, as a reciprocal
concession, the name of Nutesa was kept. Coetzee was appointed chairman
and now works with three black deputies, representing administrative
staff, academics and manual workers. The Nutesa leadership proved to be
as successful at bread-and-butter unionism as they had been at
political strategy. As the new majority union on the campus, they were
able to secure wage increases all round and housing subsidies for
categories of workers previously not eligible for them. Ironically
enough, Nutesa also proved to be the most important beneficiary of
transformation and transparency. As majority union, they are
statutorily entitled to a powerful voice on the technikon council. They
must also be kept informed and thoroughly consulted by management on
all major issues. When, therefore, the membership of Nutesa could no
longer tolerate Mokadi’s leadership, they were extremely well placed to
start the process of removing him.
Since Mokadi’s suspension, the acting rectorate have stopped pushing
ahead on the university question. They await further instructions from
above. Much less emphasis is being placed on the requirement for
research. The fever pitch of the Mokadi era has thoroughly subsided.
Public relations are low-key and office hours have regained their
accustomed brevity. Nutesa and the acting rectorate of the institution
are not, however, inclined to be reactionary. Their visions of the
future are remarkably similar and, unlike Professor Mokadi, they cannot
be accused of attempting to substitute style for substance. The
administration insists that it will continue to be guided by the
transformation charter which, naturally, calls for a “vigorous and
accelerated programme of transformation of our institution in its
entirety”. Speaking for Nutesa, Coetzee says, “We stand for
transformation; we have to accept the fact that transformation has to
happen and be positive towards that.” His black vice-presidents are
even more enthusiastic.
All are clear that transformation means more than affirmative action.
It includes keeping decision-making at the technikon as open and
consultative as possible, the final phasing out of Afrikaans as a
medium of instruction, and attempts to develop a common institutional
culture in which both blacks and whites can work comfortably. Internal
empowerment programmes have also been started, which are intended to
train the technikon’s existing black staff to take on more senior
positions. Quality, moreover, has not been neglected, at least at the
conceptual level. Both the Nutesa leaders and the administration are
concerned to maintain or even to improve the standard of teaching and
learning. Godfrey Shishana, the Nutesa representative of administrative
staff explains that he felt responsible as a member of council to the
communities that the technikon serves. He could not, for this reason,
tolerate a lowering of standards in the name of transformation. Senior
management are equally concerned with quality. They are, in fact,
currently considering the adoption of what is referred to as the “total
quality management system”, which will involve regular peer and
external review of all the technikon’s departments, co-ordinated by an
office and a director of quality management. This scheme, though
somewhat top-heavy and expressed in bloated management-speak, is
entirely laudable. The question remains, though, of how much of it will
prove possible to implement.
Doubts are in order because of the way in which the real core of
transformation — affirmative action — is being pursued since Mokadi’s
suspension. Although it began during the Mokadi period, it has been
carried on with extra vim and vigour in his absence. Guided by the
Affirmative Action Monitoring Task Team, its goal is “to develop a
staff profile that will reflect the needs and demographics of the
region and country.” This leaves a little room for manoeuvre but not
much — and the current administration is in no mood to equivocate. All
new appointments are to be of black people. If a white person is felt
to be absolutely necessary, the decision to appoint him or her can only
be made by a committee of the acting rector and his two deputies. They
are unlikely to do so unless every possible avenue for finding a black
person has been exhausted. Affirmative action, what is more, is to be
both strategic and top-down.
Certain positions throughout the technikon’s administration have been
identified as strategic, which simply means that the continued presence
of a white person in that job is intolerable and that they are to be
replaced by a black as quickly as possible. Clarity about which these
jobs are is difficult to obtain, but a Nutesa source considers
financial administrators and administrative heads of faculties to be
quite definitely strategic. Top-down affirmative action means that the
most senior positions will be targeted first, whether they are
strategic or not. Vacant director-level posts are also going to be
filled by blacks only.
All tertiary institutions are obliged to submit to the education
ministry a three-year rolling plan with an equity component. In its
plan, the Vaal Triangle Technikon states that this year, the faculty of
management science is to be divided in two, and half of it is to have a
black secretary and a black dean. Next year, all academic department
are to get a black “shadow” head, who will “function together with
existing heads of department, in order to take over the position within
a determined time span”. A similar scheme will apply in some divisions
of the administration. Less detail is provided for 2000, but parallel
appointments will continue. From this year forward, early retirements
of white staff will be encouraged and those occupying strategic
positions are to be provided with severance packages.
These schemes do not, however, contemplate the removal of academics
with valuable teaching skills. White lecturers in engineering or
accountancy will not have their posts designated as “strategic”, and
new white employees in these areas may pass the tests set by the
rectorate committee. The chances, however, of people with such skills
taking a job or choosing to stay for long in such an environment are
not large. They are being told, in effect, that although they may
continue to teach their access to higher pay and promotion are
permanently blocked on racial grounds.
Considered as a whole, the Vaal Triangle Technikon’s affirmative
action policy could hardly fail to warm the heart of even the most
enthusiastic Africaniser. The current administration, unlike Professor
Mokadi, is utterly unafraid that affirmative action of this sort
amounts to setting people up to fail. The anecdotal evidence, however,
is that such failures are already evident. Some people, it is clear,
have been “affirmed” without being “empowered”, as the jargon puts it.
One young lecturer I met in the course of this investigation began his
career at the technikon as a student activist. He proved a successful
and responsible leader and at the end of his three-year BTech degree,
was offered a junior job in the student affairs administration — a
sensible enough move. So powerful, however, are the affirmative action
pressures at the technikon that he was effectively ordered to become a
lecturer in the faculty of management. As he himself is the first to
admit this is a position for which he is almost totally unprepared. He
is intelligent, high-principled and hard-working. He is popular with
his students and does his best for them. He reads around his subject as
widely as he can at an institution possessed of only 33 000 books. He
would, in other words, make an outstanding academic given the proper
training. At the moment, though, he seriously believes (and tells his
students) that the recent decline in the value of the Rand can be
largely attributed to South Africa’s return to the Commonwealth. The
Queen of England, in his opinion, has in this way gained considerable
control over the country, which she uses to sinister,
currency-weakening ends.
Despite the thorough-going nature of the technikon’s affirmative
action scheme, there is no resistance to it anywhere along the
management-Nutesa axis. Speaking for his union’s white members, Nic
Coetzee acknowledges that “it is realistic for the whites to feel fear
in this whole situation.”
Nutesa, however, has made it its business to ensure that those whites
who have to leave to make room for affirmative action appointments will
do so with dignity. There is no disagreement from the black Nutesa
leaders or from the rectorate. Dignity, in this context, appears to be
largely a matter of money. According to the Durand report, the price of
dignity had been originally calculated to include R7.6 million for
payments to officially retired white staff who were to return on
contract to assist their black replacements. After protest by Mokadi
supporters had resulted in negative publicity for this scheme, Nutesa
and the rectorate decided that dignity could be valued at R3.6 million
in contracts for retirees. Details of the retrenchment compensation and
early retirement packages themselves are, once again, hard to obtain —
but these packages are said to be just as consistent with dignity as
the contract arrangements.
The PAC-Afrikaner alliance that is Nutesa is a genuinely non-racial
alliance, committed to achieving its goals through negotiated
consensus. It looks after its members’ material interests with great
effectiveness. Its leaders are charismatic and appear to be personally
honest. But neither group has demonstrated a serious interest, despite
the total quality management programme, in providing a decent level of
tuition for the future. Professor Mokadi, for all his buffoonery and
his more serious faults, cares deeply for education. The leadership
(and so, by implication, the rank-and-file) of Nutesa, despite some of
their rhetoric, do not give it as much priority. The whites want an
exit with a soft landing, while the blacks want a quick rise into jobs
that are not over-demanding.
The current rectorate team are well-meaning people whose detailed
local knowledge ought to continue to be available to the technikon
under its new management. They do understand that the primary role of
the institution is to teach skills vital to South Africa’s future. What
they appear to lack, though, is an ability to put some distance between
themselves and the “transformation agenda” presently so dominant in
South Africa. At the moment, they appear not to have access to a mode
of thinking which would enable them to work out, in a principled way,
which parts of the transformation agenda ought to be adopted for the
good of the institution and its students and which should be modified
or rejected. Not surprisingly, given its history, transformation at the
technikon seems a matter of all or nothing: indefensible racist
reaction or total Africanisation.
The education ministry, too, could learn something from the recent
history of the technikon. It is quite likely that the Durand
recommendations will reduce the influence of the Nutesa-PAC alliance on
the campus. If a popular and effective ANC-aligned rector is found, it
may even be possible to restore Nehawu to majority status and to return
Sasco to the SRC. However, the tensions and inefficiencies created by
attempting to run an educational institution along the lines required
by the Education Act will not cease to exist. Situations will continue
to arise in which the rector, the union and student politicians will
disagree in public. So, too, will administrative navel-gazing and union
feather-bedding. Strikes, demonstrations and other interruptions of
education will very likely continue to be frequent. Most serious of all
the neglect of students and the denial of their right to the best
possible education will also most likely persist at the Vaal Triangle
Technikon.