The principal and vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa (Unisa), Prof Puleng LenkaBula, is reported to have instructed the university's head of human resources to authorise and ensure her annual bonus was equivalent to that of her predecessor Prof Mandla Makhanya a year before it was due.
LenkaBula at this stage had not completed a year in office, while Makhanya had completed 10 and was due to retire when he received the payout. It seems she saw nothing amiss about this cavalier approach to university resources or her unfounded attitude of entitlement.
One imagines the head of human resources did not know how to handle this instruction, given the lack of due process and the absence of a performance review signed by the chair of Council. He thus delayed and prevaricated, whereupon the impatient VC approached the head of finance and demanded her bonus be paid by noon the next day.
There is no way of knowing whether this was executed or not, but it offers some insight into the manner in which the VC conducted herself from the beginning of her tenure at the institution.
Upon assuming office, LenkaBula overspent the budget for the refurbishment of official residence Cloghereen, as well as that for the purchase of an official vehicle for the vice-chancellor's use. To date, the VC has not occupied the residence and the university is required to pay rent on the house she lives in.
She persuaded Council to populate her office with more than three times the number of personnel Makhanya had.
I count myself among many well-meaning people who expressed, formally or otherwise, concerns about the goings-on at the university. None of us had any joy. The institution we knew so well and loved so much had become deaf to reason
Many of these posts were non-existent and duplicated jobs done elsewhere in the university. She increased the salaries of select staff, in one instance backdating payment by 15 years. Fearing industrial action, the university felt compelled to provide commensurate salary increases for the remaining staff.
None of this was budgeted for and was by no means the only irregular instruction resulting in unbudgeted expenses for the university. Cash advances to purchase laptops for certain staff on her say-so have also come to light. This penchant for irregular and wasteful expenditure appeared to be becoming the VC's signature.
LenkaBula is accused of a litany of management disasters in independent assessor Prof Themba Mosia report, published by the minister of higher education, science and technology recently.
Her conduct shows she does not consider herself accountable; has no regard for the policies and regulations of the university, let alone the prescripts of the government in oversight of higher education institutions; and her practice and understanding of leadership are undesirable in a centre of higher learning.
She swayed her power in the institution like a tinpot dictator writ large. More alarmingly, she demonstrated she has no regard for her colleagues, including women.
The Moisa report is not isolated. In 2020 a task team led by reputable scholar and businessman Dr VT Maphai was established. It included equally reputable and influential experts from South Africa and abroad.
The Council for Higher Education (CHE) also investigated. All three flagged the same issues regarding governance at Unisa — poor management, the collapse of good governance and poor leadership ethics. In short, an institution broken by the shortcomings of its executive officials.
Mosia says poor student services are the cause of many complaints covering the entire spectrum of student operations. The office of the dean of students has long ceased to treat students as if they matter. One shudders to think what the situation in examinations might be. The security of papers and certificates awarded by the institution cannot be trusted to be safe from manipulation and corruption.
Academics are at the end of their tether, fielding seemingly insuperable issues, including the work overload, hundreds of unfilled posts, the lowering of academic standards, (un)fairness in the election of the professoriate and research grants, among others.
The department of higher education has to contend with Unisa enrolments that are out of kilter with the approved enrolment plan and a throughput rate that is plummeting. The senate, on the other hand, is divided, at times racially, but also regarding a common understanding of academic governance, transformation and the idea of a university.
So rapid and comprehensive has been the departure of skilled administrators and senior academics that by 2020, when Makhanya was to retire, he was the only executive in place who was at the institution when I left in 2010. The aforementioned are the reasons so many left the university. Others were simply purged and the university lost many years of experience.
The work so meticulously undertaken in institutional research and planning by the likes of late professors Narend Baijnath and George Subotzky, and Liana Griesel (now Joubert), could never be recovered once they were pushed out precipitously. Formidable and valuable professionals such as the head of the legal office and the internal audit executives were simply discarded.
The university has been paying the price of such recklessness since. No wonder student numbers have ballooned and the university seems disinclined to tackle pressure from students to make this open, distance and e-learning (ODeL) university a poor cousin of its residential and in-contact counterparts.
This pioneering institution has lost leadership and expertise that put it at the cutting edge as a modern and progressive higher education instrument. At times, it almost seemed apologetic and ashamed of its pedigree.
There can be no doubt leadership, management and governance have been at issue at Unisa, according to Makhanya, since a cabal at the university staged an effective coup d’etat in 2015.
All systems of management and governance were taken over by under/unqualified and inexperienced people, some of whom were recent student activists there. Some key departments and colleges were simply taken over: human resources, student affairs, ICT, SCM and Council. Much has been said about the dominance of the Black Forum and the extent to which, in the name of transformation, the concept of a university was trashed.
The colleges of law and accounting seem to have been the epicentre of these counterfeit ideas that caused dissent, discord, contestation, anxiety and fear among staff. Some of us raised alarm bells about the deteriorating prestige of the law college and that, for successive years, what was once among the best performing accountancy schools in the country was performing so dismally that the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) had to intervene.
I count myself among many well-meaning people who expressed, formally or otherwise, concerns about the goings-on at the university. None of us had any joy. The institution we knew so well and loved so much had become deaf to reason.
In October 2021 I was alarmed by stories — that Unisa had become a degree factory, that its degrees no longer had value in the market place, that it was common practice for students to hire ghost writers, that assessments of essays went unattended for long periods and the supervision of postgraduate students lacked diligence and rigour — that I wrote to the chairperson of Council to express my fears.
The letter was copied to the VC. Having received a defensive response from the chair, I sensed the university was not amenable to such concern about the gravity of the matter. So I wrote back to the chair in utter exasperation, saying the following:
“On this occasion, my issue had to do with the reputational damage that is being done to the integrity, quality and standards of the Unisa qualifications.”
I called on the Council and the vice-chancellor to resign. Silence. I recall this to make the point that my voice was one among many which sought to save Unisa. Alas, to no avail.
That said, I make three observations about the institution and its future, bearing in mind that 2023 is its 150th anniversary. It received its charter in 1873 as the University of the Cape of Good Hope. To the shame of our generation, and for the first time in its history, there is a rising, well-substantiated crescendo of voices appealing for Unisa to be placed under administration.
First, Mosia is partially correct to state LenkaBula joined a university that was broken to a degree, but I would suggest she did not seek to reverse the trend. Rather she contributed to its further disintegration, thus failing in becoming a transformational leader.
Second, LenkaBula’s academic discipline is theological ethics. It is fair to expect such a leader to be steeped in her discipline and allow it to inform her conduct. She failed to conduct herself as an ethical leader.
Instead, it appears that she is inordinately focused on benefits. However, from her numerous speeches, I can concede the sound bites from avant-garde ideas on an African, anti-colonialist university. We yearn for more practical applications of such ideas. As vice-chancellor she brooks no dissentient voice, thus undermining the character of a university as a universe of contesting ideas.
Third, LenkaBula does not understand what university leadership ought to be or what effective management in a constitutional democracy entails. At its best, a university is a community of peers who respect each other and are gifted with knowledge and intelligence.
The task of a leader is to understand the gifts each brings to the collective will, to articulate a common pursuit of that ideal, to persuade and influence colleagues to buy into that idea rather than to impose one’s will, and to shape it together and give it substance. In that sense, no-one is more important than another. I often stated this as leadership by presence.
This means one must understand that in a university we cultivate idealism. At their most advanced, universities cultivate this idea and make it work for as many members of the collective as possible, forever mindful that the institution does not exist for itself. It is difficult to be a bully in a well-managed university.
Power is diffused and accountable. Every university has its unique features, identity and branding. It creates in academics, staff, students and graduates loyalty that shapes the mind.
I like the idea that the university is devoted to making us more human and serves “to unleash the potential of every person”, as stated in the preamble to our constitution. The vice-chancellor is a driver of a university's vision. But what happens when they are without a vision? Evidently, LenkaBula is not a visionary educationist.
That said, there can be no gainsaying the truth that she was largely let down by the chair and members of Council, her putative employers. They failed to rein her in. It is true she should not carry this burden alone. Council must take responsibility.
My final point is to state what I regard as obvious — that Mosia might have been coy to state upfront that Unisa has been under the capture of special interests since 2015. As such, nothing that's happened since was erroneous. The institution set about repurposing itself to satisfy the avarice, the wanton and insatiable needs of a cabal hell-bent on profiting from its resources and access to any opportunity it provided to unearned power and influence.
It was not without purpose that inexperienced and undereducated people were drafted in to hold sway at Council and elsewhere in the university. It was not a mistake that former chair Sakhi Simelane was virtually “ruling” the institution as if he was vice-chancellor.
It was accordingly not for nothing that a vice-chancellor was appointed under the aegis of Simelane in the face of many objections and the general sense that the appointment was underwhelming to many who cared about Unisa and its future.
I was not among them. There was none of the care with which Dr Mathews Phosa, chair of Council in 2010, took the responsibility for succession planning as I was coming to retirement. Council identified Makhanya as a potential successor. He was appointed pro vice-chancellor three years before my departure and the university paid for him to undertake an advanced senior executive management course at Harvard Business School.
What could be the way forward? The obvious imperative is to accept and act on the recommendations of the Mosia report. This means that without wasting time, the Council must be dissolved and the vice-chancellor put through a disciplinary process.
An administrator must be appointed who will bring gravitas and purpose to the institution. Ideally, the administrator must bring a team of experts with a mandate to restore the university's mission, including its character as an ODeL institution among the world's mega universities. Ideally, such a team should have expertise in targeted approaches to challenges, where priorities and sequencing of interventions are key. The administrator must be guaranteed at least three to five years to end the institutional malaise and restore it to its former glory, in particular, in the field of distance and e-learning education which it pioneered.
The first task of the administrator must be to take disciplinary action against the vice-chancellor, undertake a forensic investigation of the university, including, if necessary, persuading the president to appoint the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to undertake any investigation necessary to render all present and former members of the executive, Council and staff accountable for their actions.
There is a conversation South Africa is yet to conduct meaningfully regarding the role and place of a university in national life. There is reason to believe we have lost our way somewhat.
If one gauges the goings-on at various higher education institutions and the challenges society has to contend with, one realises a renewed vision of higher education is urgently needed — one that goes beyond that of the 1995 Commission on Higher Education (which has become corrupted). The establishment of a related commission is imperative.
In the era of the post-industrial revolution, smart technologies and a knowledge society and economies, universities have become vital for human resource development and innovations to solve our complex developmental challenges and save our planet. Our competitive and complementary edge largely depends on the health and positioning of our universities. Many studies indicate a close correlation between their general performance and development indicators. A learning and knowledge society captures the imagination and is rooted in culture, morality and values.
* Pityana is professor emeritus of law, University of South Africa, where he was principal and vice-chancellor from 2001 to 2010
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