A response to Eloff's open letter to Minister Nzimande

Theuns Eloff defends the indefensible on North West University.

In his open letter to the Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, the former Vice Chancellor of North West University (NWU), Theuns Eloff, makes a number of spurious allegations. I wish to respond to just a few.

Firstly, Eloff says that the Minister made an undertaking to the Council not to release the report. Some Council and senior management members who handed the report to the Minister did ask him not to release it but he gave no undertaking not to. (I was at that meeting and Eloff was not.) The Minister had not even read the report at that time and so was in no position to make such an undertaking.

At that meeting the Minister was told that the Council actually considered not giving him a copy of the report. It seems that some members of the Council obviously consider the university to be their private property - rather than a public institution that should be reporting to public representatives. On reading the report, it became clear to the Minister that such an indictment on the use of public funds and the mistreatment of students should not be swept under the carpet.

The Minister's remarks to the media were indeed based on those of the Independent Investigation Task Team appointed by the NWU Council. It was, however, also based on a series of other reports all of which had similar findings and made similar allegations. All of these reports were conducted by eminent and credible persons. However, their recommendations were never seriously implemented. Degrading and humiliating initiation practices continued to take place without any meaningful attempt to stop them.

Eloff takes objection to the Minister's criticism of NWU's federal model of campus autonomy. However, the autonomy model at NWU has clearly been used as a cover for maintaining racial segregation.  How else do we account for the fact that, 20 years after the advent of democracy and 10 years after merger that established the university, the student population at the Potchefstroom campus is overwhelming white and that of the Mahikeng campus are overwhelmingly black. Little effort has been made to change this. All evidence points in the opposite direction. It is in no way a fallacy to say that this is a largely untransformed university and still reflects the apartheid past.

Hopefully we can now look to the future with some hope, if not yet with untrammeled optimism. The new Vice Chancellor and the new Acting Chair of Council have both undertaken to ensure that real transformation does take place at NWU.  All democratic-minded individuals in the university and in SA society should support them to deal with the resistance that they are inevitably bound to meet.

John Pampallis

Special Advisor to the Minister of Higher Education and Training

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