It is time to face an unpleasant reality: the University of Fort Hare might not be salvageable.
How many assessors has the famed institution had over the years, those experts sent in by the higher education department to make sense of the crisis and to recommend intervention?
How many administrators have come and gone over the years to implement the recommendations of the assessors and allow the university to reset in management and/or governance?
None of these interventions worked and the reasons are now crystal clear.
There is yet another outside team deployed to Fort Hare; its task is impossible.
The emotional arguments for keeping Fort Hare open are touchingly familiar.
Home of great political leaders of the past.
Oldest black university, one which preceded apartheid policy.
A rural institution ideally positioned to graduate leaders from the hinterlands for South Africa and the world.
But what if this famed university is in no position to ever become a stable, productive institution whose degree certificates deliver on the promise of a high-quality education?
UFH has been captured by criminal elements on and around the campus and the grip of criminality is so broad and deep that the institution cannot be rescued under these conditions.
Criminal networks reach up the provincial hierarchy and, it appears, into elements inside the national government as well.
Renegade student leaders, taxi bosses, politicians and municipal bosses are alleged to have come together in ways which have systematically and intentionally weakened the regulatory policies, plans and processes which are intended to protect institutional resources from predators.
Those who stood in the way of the predatory run on institutional resources were assassinated.
Do not forget the head of fleet management and the vice-chancellor’s bodyguard who was caught in the crossfire when the bullets were intended for the head of the institution.
So far, Prof Sakhela Buhlungu and some of his senior staff have narrowly escaped assassination.
I hate to say this, but there will be more attempts on the lives of staff who block access to the university’s resources.
God forbid, but there are likely to be more deaths.
Which raises the questions:
Why Fort Hare (1)?
In research for the book, Corrupted: A study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities, I shared the story of a taxi boss who told the vice-chancellor something like this: “Gauteng has gold mines, we do not have mines. The university is our mine.”
As honest and as scary as that. While others might view the UFH as a place of higher learning, an institution which can change the fortunes of generations of poor students and their families, the predators view an immediate resource to be grabbed.
Why Fort Hare (2)?
Because every other resource in the region has been stripped dry.
For decades the municipalities have been routinely exposed through qualified audits; they don’t even try any more.
From health to education, there seems to be a hand in the trough.
Politicians and officials have even swooped down on symbolic resources, such as qualifications obtained irregularly to boost their academic status and financial standing.
Everything at Fort Hare is up for grabs and everyone wants in.
Have you ever heard a list of university student demands (September 12) to include: “We demand jobs for the Alice community ... employ 60% of the labour force from Alice”?
Small wonder that when this “memo” was handed over, the group blocking access to campus were community members, taxi owners and a disgraced ward councillor among the students.
The predators are deadly hungry and if they cannot get what they want, they will raze the place to the ground.
This month, the beautiful education facility on the East London campus was burned to smithereens.
From Dikeni to the East London campus, buildings went up in flames — a brand-new student clinic, upgraded agricultural science laboratories (R20m), a renovated staff centre and three wings of the main administration building.
Archives, staff records, destroyed.
As spectacular flames licked the open sky, the perpetrators cynically “distanced” themselves from the violence.
The university will rebuild these vital campus facilities to the approximate tune of half-a-billion rand.
I fear some of these buildings will be burned down again in the future, as happened in the past.
If we can’t get our hands on those damn resources, the logic seems to go, then nobody is going to progress through this place.
Over the top? One day as buildings went up in flames, political operators blocked fire engines from accessing the campus.
The SA media has been superficial in its reporting of events.
“The students want the vice-chancellor to resign since his appointment was extended beyond the retirement age of 65.”
If you believe that is the reason for the mayhem at Fort Hare, you probably believe that Santa Claus and the Tokoloshe are close relatives.
The council of a university has the authority to extend a senior appointment until an acceptable replacement has been found. Not ideal, but it happens.
This is about targeting the one man who has stood in the way of the predators and when they could not kill him (that goal is not off the table), they slandered him and, when he insisted on fulfilling his job, they started to burn the institution.
“The unhappy students” are, in effect, a small coterie of disaffected student leaders, including one who was suspended, and who it is alleged works in cahoots with forces inside and outside the university.
What is really tragic about developments at Fort Hare is that they happen against the backdrop of significant academic progress in recent years under vice-chancellor Buhlungu and his team.
I was there last year to witness the steady growth in research and scholarship; the stabilisation of once shaky academic programmes; and the recruitment of really talented young academics across faculties including some rising stars in the humanities.
All of this is now at risk, a leaking bucket which cannot be fixed.
Why is Fort Hare not salvageable?
First, because the predatory group holding the institution hostage extends into the criminal and political underworlds.
University managers are simply not equipped to deal with such powerful and relentless forces.
Second, because there has been no effective or sustained intervention from the presidency and the prosecuting authorities.
As many suspect, they too are compromised by influential elements in the political world.
I understand the vows of the minister of higher education and the vice-chancellor to reopen the university for final examinations.
Most Fort Hare students are not part of this mess and their livelihoods are at stake.
But this short-term rescue plan resolves nothing in the long term.
You cannot learn under fire, in this case, literally.
Your degree will be meaningless in the marketplace when employers calculate that a constantly interrupted education programme does not translate into a qualification of any value.
And when the costs of higher education are counted in dead bodies, that surely is a price too high to pay.
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