JONATHAN JANSEN | Profs and uni managers have targets on their backs — what’s going on?

Let’s talk about academic assassinations. That’s right, the fatal mowing down of academics at South African universities.

There’s a long history of such brutality in higher education and it is time to connect the dots and ask ourselves some difficult questions about this phenomenon in the present day. But let’s not forget that the assassination of academics has its roots in the apartheid era when struggle heroes like Rick Turner, Ruth First, David Webster and others were targets of the white nationalist government.

Then, the motives of the assassinations were clear: eliminate the voices of activist academics to preserve the racist state. Now, 30 years into our democracy, the reasons vary, but at the heart of the new wave of academic killings is corruption.

Few might remember the case of the UCT postgraduate student who killed professor Brian Hahn in his office, hitting the mathematician with an umbrella before stamping on his head five times. He suffered severe facial fractures, had a stroke the next day that paralysed one side of his body, and would die of his injuries. The student and one-time contract lecturer at the university was found not guilty by virtue of mental illness (schizophrenia).

Of course, professors are not immune from violent crime in the community — professors Lise Smuts 2005; Michael Larkin in 2007; Kevin Rochford 2008; Mohamed Saber Tayob 2022, and many others. But what happens when professors are killed in the course of doing their work?

The hit on Prof Gregory Kamwendo of the University of Zululand was linked to his exposure of academic fraud at the university. The attempted hits on Fort Hare vice-chancellor Prof Sakhela Buhlungu, and his academic management colleagues, was a response to the determined cleaning up of corruption at this Eastern Cape University.

Sometimes non-academic staff get in the way of the murderers, as when Mboneli Vesele was murdered shortly after dropping his boss, VC Buhlungu. When Petrus Roets, the head of fleet and transport manager at Fort Hare, decided to close the taps on corruption, he was warned and then bullets poured into his body coming off the ramp of a national road in the province. It is not only academics who are being slaughtered for their fight against corruption.

It was the tragic murder last week of the deputy vice-chancellor (institutional support and development) at Walter Sisulu University, Prof Sinethemba Mpambane, which again raised the spectre of academic assassinations on our campuses. It was a hit, said several commentators, because his laptop, cellphones and a significant amount of cash (R27,000) were left untouched. It is too early to speculate on what exactly the reasons were for the assassination, but there is concern that this portfolio was concerned with contracts.

There is a compelling reason to hit on key figures in university leadership who are bent on turning around corruption within these institutions. This trend will be especially evident in rural areas where the university stands out like a sore thumb in a sea of poverty — a visible and very attractive source of state funding available for being ripped off.

The sad reality is that academic assassinations in South Africa are not going away soon. There is a compelling reason to hit on key figures in university leadership who are bent on turning around corruption within these institutions. This trend will be especially evident in rural areas where the university stands out like a sore thumb in a sea of poverty — a visible and very attractive source of state funding available for being ripped off.

Why? Because as municipalities have been sucked dry by corrupt officials, the corrupt turn to the only reasonably functioning wellspring of resources, the public university. There is only one problem and that is when people of conscience within universities resist the run on these funds, then they must be taken out. This is where the criminality in the community fuses with the criminality on campuses and the most efficient mechanism for dealing with resistors is assassination. There are any number of middlemen who are eager to pocket R20,000 or R50,000 or much more for eliminating a high-profile target like a vice-chancellor, deputies or deans. They do not need to know the person; a photograph on a cellphone is enough to pop-off an academic leader.

None of this is possible without help from the inside. Someone needs to alert the outsider to the movements of the prominent insider on, off and around campus; to indicate where and how institutional funds flow; to create mechanisms for the illicit flow of internal monies. In short, universities are complex places and to override existing defences against fraud and corruption requires assistance from within the university.

There are of course less murderous mechanisms for profiting from crime and that is our other new national sport, kidnapping for ransom. But this method would not work for academics because the goal is not a short-term, one-off windfall payment. With academic assassinations the object is to prise open the doors to a long-term, sustained run on the institutional coffers of a university. And here the killing of an honest, ethical manager is not even the principal aim of assassination. It is without doubt a warning shot across the bow of the university to anyone who stands in the way of what is and will become a relentless, never-ending attack on institutional resources.

If you are a senior university manager, especially in a rural or semi-rural university where your portfolio includes tenders and contracts, make no mistake, you have a target on your back. No job is worth your life.

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