On December 6, 2017 I wrote about UCT’s continuing problems (“UCT’s troubles continue”). My claim – UCT’s inability fully to complete the last three academic years, was predicated on Max Price’s use of the word “integrity” (wholeness, fullness) in characterizing completion of the 2017 academic year.

On December 12, 2017 UCT’s Elijah Moholola, - Manager - Media Liaison and Social Media, Communication and Marketing Department -published a rebuttal of my article in the same publication.

Regrettably, he misinterpreted just about everything I had carefully and painstakingly articulated, and countered with information that was either unrelated to the points I had made, or injected information that was off point entirely.

But what drew my attention in particular, and needs to be addressed, was his assertion that: “[I] assume that “negotiation” is conceding [sic] to protesters’ demands…[and] that the executive has been firm on matters of unlawful behaviour”.(emphasis added).

I neither made, nor intimated, either of these points, but, the door now being opened, and in the interests of journalistic integrity and overall honesty, I shall address the latter of the two assertions he made – ie “...that the executive has been firm on matters of unlawful behaviour”.

To test this assertion, a formal request for information regarding disciplinary hearings and actions at UCT over the last three years, was made in late 2017 According to the replies received to this request, the following emerges:

1. The only UCT disciplinary hearings and/actions relating to almost three years of student demonstrations were held, or occurred, during the 2016 calendar year;

2. There were no tribunals/hearings, or any other kind of official UCT actions relating to student protests during 2015 or 2017;

3. Three (3) students were expelled in 2016. All three subsequently received clemency.

4. All nine (9) students disciplined in other ways (i.e. not expulsion, but including, inter alia, rustication) in 2016 likewise received clemency.

5. Twenty-three (23) students were charged with criminal offences in October 2015, and shortly thereafter the University made representations to the Director of Public Prosecutions to withdraw charges against these students.

Additionally, the public record shows the following:

1. In 2016, during protracted negotiations with student protesters, Masixole Mlandu was arrested (not for the first time) for breaking into a university building and intimidating the staff therein. He was held without bail (this time) but Max Price intervened, indicating that negotiations could not proceed without this “leader”, and urged bail. Masixole received bail.

2. On May 13, 2015, Max Price ( with the concurrence of Council) announced a blanket amnesty for all protest-related incidents that occurred between March 9, 2015 ( the day violent protests began at UCT) and May 18 of the same year.

In short, during almost three years of intermittent violent protests on campus, UCT’s internal disciplinary body(ies) acted against 12 students, all of whose sanctions were suspended by the granting of clemency. The clemencies will be considered by the Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission (IRTC), a body only very recently constituted. The Commission’s hearings, whose costs will run to about 5 million Rand, was embargoed just days ago (“UCT to embark on its own TRC”. Ra’eesa Pather, Mail & Guardian, 1 Feb. 2018).

Three years of violent student demonstrations resulted in extensive property damage, defilement of several buildings, destruction by fire of numerous artworks, violent intimidation of many students and some faculty, not to mention at least three assaults on the person of the VC, multiple acts of arson (including that of the VC’s office), the complete closure of multiple campuses on several occasions, defferment of end of year examinations in all three years, the need to resort to “blended learning” (whatever that is, and, again, UCT is not a correspondence college), disruption and closure of libraries on several occasions, and the reality that neither the 2016, nor the 2017, academic years was completed on time, or completely ( i.e. with “integrity”, to use Max Price’s own word).

Of the (doubtless) thousands of individual acts of vandalism, assault, intimidation, arson, and violations of three High Court interdicts, over the past three years, we now know that only twelve students were disciplined by UCT, all of their sanctions being later suspended through clemency.

That a climate of impunity has been created, and still exists, at UCT is borne out by the recurrent nature of these spasms of violence. The lawbreakers, hooligans and thugs who have been terrorizing UCT for three years know this, and the culture of impunity will not serve UCT well going forward, as it has not in the past.

The execrable, not to mention excremental, behaviour by many of the protesters, almost entirely without sanction, harms UCT in ways that, already apparent, will only amplify in the years to come, assuming a continuing near-total lack of meaningful action (not merely rhetoric) by UCT in holding the lawbreakers and hooligans to account.

The rights of the overwhelming majority of students, faculty and staff, to learn, teach, conduct research, and otherwise serve UCT’s core mission, have been totally compromised, not only by the conduct of hooligans and thugs, but by UCT’s inability and unwillingness to sanction these behaviours.

Mr. Moholola is demonstrably dead wrong on the issue of UCT’s Executive being “firm” on demonstrators; an issue that he alone raised, and that has now been definitively addressed.