Judy Dlamini: I bring my passion for education
● Judy Dlamini believes a chancellor’s role at a university is to link the various stakeholders of the institution because it “doesn’t exist as an island”.
Dlamini, 59, a medical doctor and author of Equal But Different, which is based on her research for her doctorate in business leadership, is the executive chairwoman of the Mbekani Group.
Commenting on a chancellor’s role at a university, she said: “It’s important that you actually become the bridge between students, between the community and the university’s management.
“It [a chancellor’s position] is a ceremonial position. It’s unlike a vice-chancellor, who is equivalent to a CEO.
“What I bring is my passion for education.”
She and her husband, Sizwe Nxasana, the chairman of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, founded the Sifiso Learning Group, the holding company for Future Nation Schools.
Unlike the mainstream government schools, their schools focus on project-based learning.
Their schools aim to achieve a 100% universityentrance qualification in every matric class.
“We have a school that starts with 18-month-old babies. We believe that early childhood is where you need to start, where you can still develop the brain of a child.
“We use the augmented Montessori model, which actually works very well with project-based learning. I bring that to the party.”
Dlamini’s first encounter with the University of the Witwatersrand was while she was still a general practitioner in Umlazi, a township in Durban.
“They used to offer a medical emergency course that ran over the weekend. I flew to Johannesburg and went to their medical school back in the late 1980s or early ’90s.”
While deciding to venture into the world of business in 1994, she realised “how much I didn’t know” and attended a weeklong course on finance for nonfinancial managers at the Wits Business School.
Realising that short courses that ran over a week or two were not the answer, she stopped practising medicine and studied full-time towards an MBA at the Wits Business School in 1998 and 1999.
“It was quite an experience and I learnt a lot and grew as a person.”
She then spent a few years at HSBC in Killarney, Johannesburg, working in corporate finance.
She said that South Africa’s education model and those of some countries globally, “haven’t kept up with the changes in the economy where we actually prepare these learners. It’s still a very ‘learn and regurgitate’ where the teacher is the custodian of knowledge and the kids have to just come and listen to what the teacher has to deliver and that is so removed from reality.” She said universities had to produce new knowledge and come up with solutions for problems that were relevant for communities.
“If you look at Wits, it’s a shame that four years shy of celebrating its centenary we are still talking about first anything, first black woman chancellor in 2018, which is a problem. But it’s not peculiar to Wits but to other institutions as well because it’s a patriarchal society.” She said institutions of higher learning were geared towards an upper-class pupil who came from a private school or a former Model C school.
“For a child who comes from a rural area, a child whose parents are uneducated, it becomes very difficult and we lose them in the process. “Unless we address that, it’s going to perpetuate the high gap between the haves and the havenots.
“What drives me as a person, wherever I am, is just making sure you do whatever it is to try and bridge that gap.
“I believe I’m the right candidate. I am passionate about education. There isn’t a decade of my life that I haven’t studied and I have studied at different universities in this country.
“I always say it’s an honour to serve and whether I’m the chancellor of Wits or not, I will continue to serve because my purpose in life is to serve,” Dlamini said.