Varsity murders pose ominous threat to higher education in SA

Professor Mohammed Saber Tayob, associated professor of accountancy, University of Limpopo.

Professor Gregory Kamwendo, dean of arts, University of Zululand .

Petrus Roets, head of fleet management, University of Fort Hare (UFH). Mboneli Vesele, bodyguard, UFH. The new killing fields, South African universities, and nobody really took notice until last week when UFH vice-chancellor Prof Sakhele Buhlungu narrowly escaped death by a matter of seconds.

His personal security detail was not so lucky.

It was not the first time the VC or, for that matter, members of his executive management came under fire in the complex where UFH administrators live. Bullets rained down.

Imagine going to work at a university under the fear that an assassin’s bullet can take you out at any time.

Suddenly, because it is a VC, petitions are circulating asking us university academics to protest against the assassination attempt on the VC.

The president is shocked, the minister outraged. Good, but where were those petitions and outrage when other university staff were being gunned down in cold blood?

Why is this happening? In poor communities like Alice (UFH) and KwaDlangezwa (UZ), the university is often the only visible and concentrated resource available to be stripped by corrupt people in the surrounding community.

Whether it is a council member wanting to do business with the university or taxi operators demanding exclusive access to student transport or staff selling certificates for degrees and diplomas, the public university is a highly exploitable resource where annual budgets run into hundreds of millions (and even billions) of rand.

Here’s the rub: anyone who stands in the way of this flourishing illicit economy will be eliminated.

As I detail in my new book, Corrupted: a study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities, Buhlungu has been cleaning up the UFH for the first time in decades.

Unlike some other university leaders, this professor is a senior scholar and not a political operator who ingratiates himself with powerful men in government.

That is why Buhlungu is a target he will not play ball.

If you think that the VC is being targeted by some small-town crooks, you are way off the mark.

This murderous situation that prevails at Fort Hare goes all the way to the top look at the names of senior politicians implicated in the corruption scandals at this university.

Once we have got past the necessary action of condemning the campus killings, we need a special commission from the president’s office to investigate these murders and make recommendations within three months for how to confront this expanding danger to the academy.

We need all the investigatory powers of the state to identify the killing machine that sustains the attacks on university staff, and put these people, high and low, in prison.

Some leaders have suggested closing UFH for a year to bring some stability and start afresh; that sounds tempting, but the murderous corrupt are not going away anytime soon.

They will simply regroup when the university reopens.

The costs to the country are high in three respects.

One, in financial terms. It takes at least 22 years (formal degree and onsite experience) to train a potential vice-chancellor for a university position.

That’s a massive investment of money and time.

When you kill these senior leaders, you are erasing a costly human resource, to put it bluntly.

Two, in replacement terms. The cupboard is bare when it comes to university leaders in SA with the five prerequisite qualities to head up these prized institutions: scholarly credentials, management capacity, leadership ability, people skills and political nous.

Three, in academic terms. Every time violence and murder happen on or around a university campus, citizens begin to lose faith in the public university.

The academic project suffers. Donors withdraw money. The top researchers and students go elsewhere.

In this respect, and despite the heroic work of Buhlungu and his team, UFH might end up with only the desperados of society enrolling or teaching at this once-famed campus.

Fourth, in human terms. I wish the media would have spent more time giving us portraits of the families of Messrs Roets and Vesele, to take only recent killings.

We know little of the horrific human impacts of these murders on those left behind.

I interviewed Mrs Roets after the murder of her husband and it was truly heartbreaking to see the consequences of this vile act on the family.

Few people know that Vesele was once an MK soldier who fought to save this country from apartheid; what a tragic irony that he was killed in a democratic and free SA.

These are some of the costs to higher education and to real families.

One thing all of us can do is to raise hell about these new killing fields and make sure that government acts in a comprehensive rather than knee-jerk manner to put an end to this dangerous threat to the future of higher education in SA.