The end of South African universities?

South Africa needs reflective leadership at its universities.
Brett Atherstone/flickr

Jonathan Jansen, vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State in South Africa until a year ago, has written a book on the country’s higher education sector. As by Fire – The End of the South African University is one of a number of recent books that set out to make sense of the current crisis in South African universities.

The crisis began in early 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall protests and gained momentum over the course of 2015. These protests fuelled, and eventually overtook the national #FeesMustFall movement. The underlying economic, cultural and political issues that drove the protests remain largely unresolved.

As by Fire is structured around three main questions: What in fact happened? Why did it happen? And what does the protest crisis mean for the future of South African universities?

Jansen draws on his own experience as well as interviews with 11 vice-chancellors in the country. His conclusion is:

In a nutshell, there is no future, and

What we are witnessing is a full system meltdown.

There are several problems with Jansen’s apocalyptic thesis.

An irresponsible thesis

Firstly, for a scholar of Jansen’s calibre, the analysis lacks a broad comparative perspective. His main reference point is the story of failing universities on the rest of the continent.

Jansen doesn’t make any comparisons to student protests across the globe – in Hong Kong, Canada, Chile, the UK, the US and Turkey, to name a few. These were also characterised by occupations of leaderless movements, threats of violence by police and militant students, reassertion of identity politics in curriculum and political stalemate.

A more thorough comparative analysis of what is happening in South Africa in relation to continental and global trends could have led to a more constructive conclusion that posed a range of future scenarios instead of a single “no future” story.

The more serious problem with Jansen’s “no future” thesis is that it’s irresponsible. Someone of Jansen’s profile has tremendous power to shape the narrative. And how South Africans interpret the events of the past two years shapes how the sector will go forward. In other words, his conclusion has consequences. Why would academics stay if they believed Jansen’s predictions with the certainty that he projects them? Why would students apply? Why would donors invest?

In the final few paragraphs Jansen attempts to wave a small flag of hope by appealing to civic action under the banners of free education for the poor and the right to education for all. This is an unconvincing attempt to end the book on a happier note.

An important perspective on leadership

What the book does offer is a view of university leaders under crisis – a close-up, zoomed-in, largely unedited perspective of 11 VC’s “under fire”, in some cases, literally. This is why the book will be of interest to anyone in higher education management.

The extensive literature of higher education leadership and management needs more of this kind of “in the trenches” study – leaders describing in their own words what it feels like to be flattened between a rock and a hard place, managing competing and contradictory demands from all sides while always under the watch of an unsympathetic media.

The book presents a view of leaders in a lose-lose situation, required to make on-the-spot judgement calls. The reader gets a close-up view of the ways in which they worked tirelessly to defend their institutions and were battered from every side. And Jansen is right to expose the extreme pressure and the personal costs that the VCs and their families paid. The accounts expose both their vulnerability and their resilience.

Jansen concludes by arguing that what’s needed more than ever before is

university leadership that is both compassionate in speaking to the student heart and competent in leading our universities in a demanding world of teaching, research, and public duty.

The missed opportunity of the book is that Jansen doesn’t explicitly extract from his interviewees what that compassionate competence looks like. In retrospect, what do they think they did right? What do they regret? What did they learn as leaders in crisis about the complexities of leading a university community at this stage of South Africa’s democracy?

Rebecca Solnit, American activist and author of Hope in the Dark, writes of the times we are living in that

this is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.

What South Africa’s universities need from their leaders now is not prophecies of doom, but deeper reflection on the transformative potential of this difficult historical moment.

Suellen Shay, Dean and Associate Professor, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Disclosure of party funding: only if it’s relevant, says DA

Not all funding information is useful to voters, argues opposition party

By Ashleigh Furlong
16 August 2017

Advocates for My Vote Counts and for the Democratic Alliance in court before the hearing on Wednesday. Photo: Ashleigh Furlong

The Democratic Alliance argued in the Western Cape High court on Wednesday that political parties should only have to disclose funding information if this is highly relevant for voters, and then only if a request is made through the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).

This was one of the arguments put forth by the DA’s counsel, Advocate Ismail Jamie, during the second day of arguments in the case brought by My Vote Counts about the disclosure of political party funding.

On Tuesday, My Vote Counts had argued that all information regarding funding of political parties should be available, and that PAIA is constitutionally flawed because it did not allow for this.

Today, Jamie said that while the DA accepted that certain types of information relating to the funding of political parties may be “reasonably required”, there were other types of private funding information that were “almost certainly not required”.

Jamie used the example of a “Mrs Bloggs” signing up to donate R50 a month to a political party. Criticising the argument by My Vote Counts that “in order to cast an informed vote or make an informed political choice, all voters need to know, on a blanket basis, every bit of information about private political party funding”, Jamie said that knowing that Mrs Bloggs contributes R50 a month to a particular political party did not aid in the voting process.

“It is inconceivable that Mrs Bloggs’ R50 influences a party’s policies,” said Jamie. He said that the application by My Vote Counts application was “devoid of facts”.

Jamie said that the “kind of donation that does impact” would be a donation from a foreign government of a large sum of money to a political party, particularly the ruling party. However, Jamie said, PAIA could be used to access this information.

This would be “highly relevant for any voter to know” because it would be “unusual” and “most odd and suspicious.”

Jamie said the relevance of the donation would depend on who made it and how big it was.
He said he was sure the average voter would be interested if the Chinese or Russian government were donating to the ANC.

In these cases, said Jamie, any claim to anonymity would be overruled by the “express public interest”.

“It is not enough to say it would be nice to have this information … That may in a general sense be so, [but] what the law requires, is that access to that information must confer upon you a substantial advantage that you would not have otherwise,” said Jamie.

He said the situation would be the same if it were a company donating to a political party.

Jamie differed from Thabani Masuku for the Minister of Justice, who argued yesterday and today that PAIA was not the correct legislation to govern the right of access to information about political party funding and that My Vote Counts should rather focus on the Electoral Act.

Jamie told the court that the request by My Vote Counts would “seek in a most dramatic way” to infringe on Parliament’s powers. “We know funding is the lifeblood of political parties, more especially of opposition parties,” he said. Even if there was a gap in PAIA, this would be up to Parliament to remedy, he said.

Referring to the founding affidavit by DA Federal Executive Chairman James Selfe, Jamie said Selfe had stated that “almost all donations” to the DA were unconditional, meaning that they did not come with any strings attached. “Because they are unconditional, they do not influence party behaviour and do not contain information that would be useful to voters,” said Jamie.

He said people did not donate to a party to try and influence the party, but because they wanted to see that party come to power, gain traction or because they believed the party would create a better life for them.

“My submission is that the vast majority aren’t going to be swayed by anodyne information about funding,” said Jamie.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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What the lack of accountability for Marikana says about Zuma's government

The scene of the Marikana massacre in South Africa that some have named the “Hill of Horror”. Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

Five years ago this week 44 people were killed in the course of an industrial dispute at a platinum mine in South Africa’s North West Province owned by Lonmin. It became known as the Marikana massacre.

For many observers, Marikana was a turning point in the presidency of Jacob Zuma – who came to power in 2009 – and in the history of democratic South Africa. Even more so, it gave an early indication of the abuse of state power that’s been the hallmark of the Zuma government.

Thirty-four miners were shot dead by members of the South African Police Service in a single day, 16 August 2012. Seventeen were gunned down by heavily armed members of police tactical response teams as they left the small hill (or koppie) they’d been occupying. Others died at the hands of the police in the course of a brutal mopping up operation that followed.

Five years on, and two years after the official Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana tragedy, no-one has been held to account. Ministers have moved to new portfolios, police commanders have retired on ample pensions, or been replaced in a blaze of litigation.

Lack of accountability

Only last week Zuma survived a vote of no confidence in parliament in the wake of a series of scandals. These included compelling evidence that he and his government are in thrall to the influential Gupta family.

Zuma’s reputation as the “Teflon President” – able to shrug off charges of everything from bribery to rape and allowing the South African state to be “captured” by the Guptas and their acolytes – dates back well beyond 2012. But, when it comes to Marikana, Zuma is not the only one with non-stick credentials.

In March this year, the country’s Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police oversight body, announced that it had identified 72 police officers to face charges. These ranged from murder to perjury and defeating the ends of justice. Since then, no further action has been taken.

Important though this is, the responsibility for the massacre doesn’t stop at those who pulled the triggers. At the outset of the Farlam Commission’s public hearings, Dali Mpofu, counsel for the miners injured at Marikana, blamed many of the deaths on ‘toxic collusion’ between the police and the mining company Lonmin.

As the inquiry progressed, Mpofu and others made strenuous efforts to blame Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy president of South Africa for the bloody denouement of 16 August. At the time Ramaphosa was a shareholder and non-executive director of Lonmin as well as a member of the ruling ANC’s National Executive Committee.

The commission itself uncovered evidence that collusion went some way beyond the police commanders and Lonmin executives on the ground. At a special briefing two days before the massacre the police commissioner for the North West province, Lieutenant General Miriam Mbombo, told a senior Lonmin executive that police were planning to move in to “kill” the strikers’ protest.

Mbombo revealed that she was acutely aware of the influence wielded by Ramaphosa. She also admitted being alive to the risk of allowing Julius Malema, who had been expelled as leader of the ANC’s Youth League, to make political capital out of the dispute.

Based on the transcript of this briefing, the Commission found that both Mbombo and the then National Commissioner of police, General Riah Phiyega, were complicit in raising political factors in their discussions about policing in Marikana. It found these discussions to be “inappropriate” and inconsistent with the constitutional requirement that

policing should be conducted in an impartial and unbiased manner.

The Commission also determined that the fatal decision to forcibly remove the striking miners from the koppie they were occupying was taken by Mbombo and not by tactical commanders with expertise in public order policing. It was then endorsed at an extraordinary session of the South African Police Service’s national management forum late on 15 August.

The commission did not find a direct link between anyone in political authority having ordered the police to take action. It did, however, conclude that the decision to remove the strikers from the koppie

was at least partly the consequence of the senior police officials feeling the need to act and to be seen to act.

This idea that the police commanders at Marikana did not need to be told what to do, or how to do it, is consistent with the social theorist Steven Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power and the ability of the powerful to secure the compliance of those they dominate without either making decisions or giving orders. The generals knew what had to be done to end a costly and politically damaging protest. They knew that it had to be done without further delay, and, if necessary, with the use of force. The result, as we now know, was the loss of 34 lives.

The way in which power, subtly but with far reaching consequences, was used at Marikana may also tell us something about how it’s used in contemporary South Africa more generally to control, perhaps even to capture, not just the police but other state institutions far beyond the criminal justice system.

Bill Dixon, Professor of Criminology, University of Nottingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The withdrawal of the Mandela book was nothing short of censorship

Posters of various newspapers paying tribute after the death of former South African President Nelson in 2013.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

“Mandela’s Last Years”, written by retired military doctor Vejay Ramlakan, has become a sought after commodity since the publisher, Penguin SA, withdrew it from the shelves in July. Ramlakan was the head of the medical team that looked after Nelson Mandela until his death in 2013.

The withdrawing and pulping of a book represents a huge expense for a publisher, as well as a source of some embarrassment. So why did the publisher do it?

Soon after the book was published, members of the Mandela family, led by his widow Graça Machel, threatened legal action. It must be admitted that the basis for any legal action wasn’t clear, although it was probably linked to defamation. The book, Machel argued, constituted “an assault on the trust and dignity” of her late husband.

Soon afterwards, the author’s employer, the South African National Defence Force, distanced itself from the book, suggesting that it may have contravened doctor-patient confidentiality.

The publisher bowed to this pressure and withdrew the book, stating that no further copies would be issued out of respect for the family. This is almost unprecedented, anywhere, and needs to be teased out more fully. After reading the book, I’ve considered how and why the publisher may have come to this decision.

Reasons for pulping a book

The decision making process for a publisher in a case like the Mandela book revolves around balancing the potential costs against reputational damage. The costs can be extensive – in publishing, all costs relating to editing, design, production, printing and distribution are made up front. It is relatively easy to make a decision to withdraw a book after publication when it may have contravened the law, mostly due to defamation of character.

Books may also be withdrawn after allegations of plagiarism, or because the accuracy of the content has been called into question. Publishers sometimes cancel contracts with their authors based on the standard waivers dealing with defamation and inaccuracies.

Publishers try to avoid these kinds of situations by performing due diligence to see if manuscripts contain anything defamatory or that breaches privacy. They employ fact checkers to avoid inaccuracy. And they require authors to warrant that their work is original and accurate.

This doesn’t mean that errors don’t sometimes slip through. But it is very unusual for a book to be withdrawn simply because it’s controversial. In fact, publishers usually support controversial titles because they create publicity, and publicity generally leads to sales.

So what happened in this particular case?

The first set of questions would relate to the credibility of the author, and the publisher’s relationship with him. Ramlakan was the head of Mandela’s medical team and had unique access to the former president over a long period of time. This means that he certainly had the access and authority to write the book, and as far as I know nobody is questioning its accuracy.

The cover of ‘Mandela’s Last Years’, which has been withdrawn.

This is important, because truthfulness is one of the main defences against defamation, as is the issue of public benefit or interest. It seems highly unlikely that a publisher would allow a nonfiction title to include material that is patently untrue or that would harm the reputation of a man like Mandela. Is there really still a need to protect the reputation of a man of such global stature?

Family permission

Linked to the question of authority is whether the work was authorised. The author has repeatedly claimed he wrote the memoir at the request of family members, and with their permission. In such a large family, it would be difficult to obtain permission from every family member, and it is quite common for family members to protest their treatment in a biography of a famous public figure.

Family members often argue that there has been a breach of privacy or that embarrassing private details have been made public. But the truth is that their authorisation is not actually necessary. Many authors write unauthorised biographies or memoirs, and while they may prove controversial, they certainly do not contravene the law. The broad variety of books already available on Mandela shows that there is ongoing public interest. It seems unlikely that each one of them was authorised by the family.

What complicates this scenario is that, as a medical doctor, Ramlakan is also expected to uphold ethical standards that an ordinary writer wouldn’t be subject to. I am not an expert in medical ethics, but there are very few medical details in the book that are not already in the public domain.

In fact, one of the purposes of the book was to counter the rumours and speculation around Mandela’s medical condition in the last years and months of his life. It does this by quietly countering inaccurate statements and setting out the bare facts. It appears that the author made a deliberate effort to avoid breaching confidentiality, and ended up writing a very respectful book.

Some have suggested that the publisher and author were simply attempting to cash in on the Mandela legacy. Whatever their motives, they shouldn’t be the basis for withdrawing a book from public circulation. Taste and motivation are not legal issues.

Censorship

Given that there is no apparent material basis for a legal attack on the book, its withdrawal reveals self-censorship on the part of the publisher. South Africa no longer has censorship laws in place, but an influential family can bring pressure to bear that amounts to the same thing. But also given that the book was already on the market, it should be asked what the effect of the withdrawal will be.

While fewer copies will be sold in bookshops, and fewer people will have access to it, it’s not possible to entirely withdraw a book from the online market. The book reviews already mention all of the most controversial parts of the book, and the action of withdrawal only serves to highlight them. The best course of action would be to allow the book to circulate freely and to stand – or fall – on its own merits. Anything else is censorship.

Beth le Roux, Associate Professor, Publishing, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Heroin trafficking through South Africa: why here and why now?

An addict prepares heroin in Lamu on the east coast of Kenya.
Reuters/Goran Tomasevic

A series of large heroin seizures have been made in South Africa since 2016, but the country is just one of the pitstops on Africa’s heroin highway.

The African continent is geographically situated between opium production and consumer states.

Heroin reaches South Africa via the southern heroin trafficking route originating in Afghanistan, where the overwhelming majority of global opium is produced.

The route goes through Pakistan and Iran to their coastlines, known as the Makran Coast. From there, the drug is loaded onto dhows which cross the Indian Ocean to transit states in either Africa or Asia, from where it is rerouted to its final destinations, mostly in Europe. The second phase of the journey can be by sea, land or air.

The dhows are large vessels often used for fishing explorations and able to undertake long journeys.

To avoid detection, the dhows either dock at island ports or remain out at sea. The heroin is then collected by smaller boats and taken ashore. The East and Southern African coastline has many inconspicuous islands to serve this purpose, which was also one of the factors luring cocaine traffickers to the cocaine plagued country of Guinea Bissau.

The coastline from Kenya to South Africa is long, with porous borders, weak maritime surveillance, weak law enforcement capacity and corrupt officials willing to turn a blind eye. There is also a large diaspora connecting different regions to East and Southern Africa.

These factors attract traffickers and mean that managing the heroin trade in South Africa is fraught with challenges. Chief among them is the transnational nature of the heroin trade, the likely increase in local heroin use and the ability of the networks who run the trade to outsmart and outperform regional law enforcement entities and their limited resources.

Changing circumstances, changing routes

There are three primary heroin trafficking routes out of Afghanistan; the Balkan Route, the northern route and the southern route. The Balkan route, stretching overland from Afghanistan to the Balkan countries and Western Europe, has experienced the bulk of heroin trafficking.

Research shows that law enforcement efforts as well as conflicts have pushed some of the trade away from the Balkan route to the southern route and maritime trafficking, where law enforcement is mostly absent. Despite an increase in the southern route’s popularity with traffickers, it remains the least used of the three.

In 2010, a surge in large maritime heroin seizures in East Africa first highlighted Africa’s role in the southern route, especially the use of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar as transit zones.

In 2014, 1,032 kg of heroin was seized from a dhow off Mombasa. It was the largest ever seizure of the drug outside of Afghanistan and its neighbouring countries.

As seizures have continued, international attention and law enforcement efforts in and around East Africa have increased. This is probably what caused traffickers to increasingly turn to landing points in Southern Africa.

South Africa is attractive for other reasons too. Drug traffickers are able to exploit the country’s efficient financial and transport infrastructure.

Indian Ocean heroin trafficking

Law enforcement on the southern route is mainly concerned with disrupting maritime heroin shipments before they reach the shore. The biggest law enforcement effort has come from the Combined Maritime Forces Combined Task Force 150.

It is a fleet of 31 international navies mandated to patrol the Western Indian Ocean to disrupt terrorist activities and financing. This includes disrupting heroin trafficking on the high seas. Between 2013 and 2016 the force seized 9.3 tons of heroin.

The task force patrols a vast area – 2.5 million square miles across the high seas, extending as far as Mozambique. South Africa must, therefore, rely on its own navy and intelligence to detect shipments that outwit the Combined Task Force.

A heroin trafficking dhow seized in Tanzanian waters, docked in Dar es Salaam next to the ferry to Zanzibar.
Carina Bruwer

But the biggest obstacle to exposing the criminal networks running the southern route has been the Combined Task Force’s lack of jurisdiction to arrest heroin trafficking crews in international waters. This has resulted in the practice of the Combined Task Force throwing the heroin overboard and setting the crew and their vessel free.

If heroin can be seized in territorial waters, the national laws of the country apply and prosecutions can follow.

Land based seizures in South Africa

It is likely that dhows are only dropping off heroin as far as Mozambique because they would attract suspicion if they travelled as far as South Africa.

Land based seizures in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique have shown that heroin is broken up when it reaches the shore and then transported onward by road. This explains the seizure of smaller amounts of heroin being transported in cars and trucks from Mozambique to South Africa.

A recent heroin seizure in Overberg in the coastal province of the Western Cape has provided new insights into what researchers and law enforcement have only been able to speculate - that southern route heroin is also being transported to and from East and Southern Africa in containers. Containerised heroin seizures have been made elsewhere along the southern route.

The heroin was found on a wine farm, hidden among boxes of wine intended for container shipment to Europe. This finally offers a more concrete link to container trafficking on the southern route, which would be harder to detect than dhows.

But lots of questions remain unanswered. These include: where did the shipment come from? Was it a single large shipment which entered at a harbour or smaller shipments that were consolidated on the wine farm? If so, which overland route was used? Was corruption involved? Is local heroin use increasing due to increased trafficking through the region?

What needs to happen?

Rooting out corruption and minimising the pool of potential small scale traffickers could be a good place to start. But the problem is much bigger than South Africa and encompasses many elements that increased law enforcement can’t address. One factor, for example, is increased local heroin consumption.

To understand, and respond to heroin trafficking networks there needs to be a coordinated effort that brings together production, transit and consumer states.

In the meantime, South Africa needs to increase its vigilance in local ports and along borders.

Carina Bruwer, PhD candidate, Institute for Safety Governance and Criminology, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.