Virus at Fort Hare dims future of poverty-stricken kids
A few weeks ago, while holidaying in Europe, I wrote a post on social media reflecting on the value of education in my personal life.
The post went viral for the simple reason that many people could relate to the story of how education changed their material circumstances. In the post, I spoke about how education rewrote the narrative of my life.
Like millions of black people in SA, I was born into poverty. The journey of my life began in the township of Soweto where I grew up in a small shack that was shared by a family of seven that relied on the income of my domestic worker grandmother.
Having the opportunity to attend university, even as it was extremely difficult to do so, was my saving grace. In spite of the financial exclusions and psychologically haemorrhaging experiences that come with being a working-class student in a competitive university, I regard the attainment of my degrees as the single-most defining and important development in my life.
Those pieces of paper enabled me to find good employment that made it possible to lift my family out of poverty. You can’t convince someone like me that education doesn’t matter. Education means everything to those with our geohistory because when you’re born into poverty and your surname is not Mandela or Motsepe, education is the only key. It is your only refuge.
This is precisely why watching the Carte Blanche interview of Prof Sakhela Buhlungu, the vicechancellor of the University of Fort Hare (UFH), was extremely distressing. In the interview, Buhlungu speaks about the massive corruption that has been unearthed at what was once a premier university in Africa.
A few weeks ago, he survived an assassination attempt that claimed the life of his personal driver, Mboneli Vesele, who died in a hail of bullets while seated inside Buhlungu’s vehicle parked outside the vice-chancellor’s residence in Alice, Eastern Cape.
Buhlungu, who immediately had to be moved to a safe location, has been fighting corruption and maladministration that has become embedded at the university. Some of the most powerful people in our country are implicated. In the interview, he speaks about a “major scam” involving politicians who were enabled to take short cuts to obtain master’s degrees and even PhDs.
And this is no surprise since even Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane was deregistered by the university following revelations that his supervisor, Prof Edwin Ijeoma, had been enrolling politicians into post-graduate programmes without meeting the minimum requirements for the qualifications.
Buhlungu’s administration has also uncovered financial crimes at the university. The Carte Blanche interview sounds like a mafia movie. We must all be enraged about what is happening at UFH and other historically black universities. We must be enraged because the very lives and futures of black people are at stake. Destroying universities like UFH that educate mainly working-class black students means the only thing that can give them a fighting chance in life is being taken away from them. The state must protect UFH and Prof Buhlungu, lest we descent into a world where education means nothing – and where people like me have no chance to ever get out of poverty.