It’s rare that the ANC Youth League enthusiastically agrees with this media group, but after the Daily Dispatch reported this week that some degrees from Walter Sisulu University might be worthless, the Youth League has come out strongly in agreement, insisting that WSU really is a terrible, rotten, very bad university.
The Eastern Cape branch of the league didn’t use those exact words, of course, but that the implication as it announced its support of convicted WSU accounting student Sibongile Mani, insisting that her only crime was “foolishness”.
At this point I must stress that I have no legal training, and am therefore in no position to judge whether helping herself to R818,000 qualified as theft or not. I know that if I’d had R14m deposited into my account I would probably have tried to find out why before I spent any of it, but that’s just me.
I do know, however, that the ANCYL is a world authority on foolishness, having produced Fikile Mbalula. I suspect it also knows a great deal about theft, having spent the last couple of decades peering over the rim of the Luthuli House ball pond and watching some world-class looters in action.
The ANCYL is a world authority on foolishness, having produced Fikile Mbalula. I suspect it also knows a great deal about theft, having spent the last couple of decades peering over the rim of the Luthuli House ball pond and watching some world-class looters in action.
So let us, for the sake of argument, try on the ANCYL’s version of reality, in which Mani is not guilty of a crime, and in which the league’s position on WSU therefore becomes brutally clear. Because what it’s telling us, by insisting on Mani’s innocence, is that you can get all the way through an undergraduate accounting degree at WSU without ever learning even the most basic aspects of financial caution, or knowing the difference between money you’re entitled to and money you’re not.
In other words, if the ANCYL is right, and Mani acted without malice aforethought — certainly, the first reports of her spending spree in 2017 showed she made no effort to hide her newfound wealth — then an accounting degree from WSU is worth fractionally less than used toilet paper.
To be fair, it’s probably not just the accounting degrees.
According to Daily Dispatch, WSU, currently rated SA’s third worst university and ranked somewhere south of 5,000th in the world, has been offering 28 academic programmes that are not registered or accredited by the council of higher education. Alarmingly, one of these is a master's degree awarded to medical specialists, so, until we know more, you might want to steer clear of any recently graduated accountants or doctors with a WSU certificate on their wall.
Mani spent money that wasn’t hers, and the law must take its course; but I can’t help hoping that her sentence will be reduced, or at least converted into something less destructive than jail time. The glaring inequality inherent in this sentence, whereby a failure to resist temptation gets you five years but actively seeking to loot SA while destroying its institutions gets you re-elected to high office in the ANC, is simply too much to stomach.
I understand why her fellow students would leap to her defence, and why Twitter is furious about the sentence.
But I would humbly propose that when it comes to commenting on legal matters, the ANCYL — the organisation that gave us Julius Malema, enthroned Jacob Zuma, and which remains a loyal ally of a corrupt patronage system — should probably put a sock in it.
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