Sunday, 29 April 2007
To all COMSA members
Comrades,
As you all know, last week I was finally fired after a 7
month disciplinary process. I am not the first person to have been forced out
of this university on political grounds in recent months. When I was fired I
was clearly told that I will not be the last.
When the media asked me questions about my removal from a
photograph and article in UKZNdaba last year I answered them honestly and in
good faith. I was certainly not being dishonest and anyone who reads the
transcript of my hearing will see that the University failed to prove their
claim that I had been dishonest.
I regret that giving my honest and well grounded opinion in
response to the questions that were put to me wasted months of my life and got
me fired. But I do not regret trying to answer the questions put to me as
honestly as I could. If trying to tell the truth at a university is something
that 'brings the university into disrepute' then there is something seriously
wrong with that university. The whole purpose of a university is supposed to be
built around the collective search for truth.
It is very important for everyone to be clear that it is not
just individuals who are being attacked. Our union is under fire too. From the
Gautschi inquisition to the slanderous article in Saturday's Witness our
hard-won freedom to organise is being destroyed. And as a result, it is not
just individuals and our union that is under attack. The whole idea of the
university, as a space of critical work in education and research, is being
undermined.
Our apartheid history means that we have no choice but to
look to the future. But this does not mean that there is only one vision of the
future. There are many and we need to discuss and debate them all. The
management's vision of the future is corporatisation plus deracialisation. They
call this being 'World Class' just like the Municipality calls evicting shack
dwellers at gun-point, and in violation of the law, being 'World Class'.
Corporatisation means giving the university to the market,
and this puts it under the power of local and global elites. It makes real
deracialisation impossible. In COMSA our vision of the future has been
democratisation plus deracialisation. We want the university to be a democratic
public institution, one that serves all of society, not just its richest
people. We have always fought for an institution that works for everyone,
including those who the market ignores because they cannot afford to pay to be
students or to have research done.
Over many years of struggle we have won decent workings
conditions for permanent staff. Today, we all know that these victories are
being rapidly undone by management. This doesn't only affect workers. Academics
were previously given the autonomy that is required for people to become
intellectuals and scholars but are now being turned into workers. They are
increasingly being placed under surveillance and under suspicion and treated as
if they are working on a production line.
Management has developed a new tactic to prevent us from
defending ourselves from their consultants who can only see our university in
terms of money. When we argue and struggle for our pay and conditions, and when
we argue and struggle for our right to be able to teach and research outside of
the rule of money, they don't argue back. Instead, they accuse us of bringing
the university into disrepute. This is not true. If anything brings the
university into disrepute, it is the way workers, poor students and now even
academics, and especially contract academics, are treated. And nothing brings
more disrepute to the university than the way that ideas are crushed and
arguments settled by intimidation rather than discussion.
But we are all the university. Stanley Naicker is as much
the university as Dasarath Chetty. We all have a right to decent pay and decent
working conditions. But for many of us the university is more than just a job.
Defending our university against an authoritarian management is not just about
defending our pockets – it goes to the heart of who we are and why we work
here.
Our university is not the only organisation that has been
'transformed' to meet the needs of the rich and the powerful. Other public
institutions have faced this too. The SABC is now a monkey that dances to the
government's tune. The HSRC had its teeth removed, and its critical thinkers
dispersed to the wind. The assault on UKZN is hardly unique.
We need to remember that what is happening to us now has
already happened all over Africa. Universities were more or less universally
ruined when the World Bank insisted on 'reform' of African universities in the
1980s. Now that we are being 'transformed,' in the same way once great
universities like Dar-e-Salaam and Ibadan were 'reformed', we need to learn as
much as we can from the academics who lived through the World Bank led attack
on African universities. It is important that we learn as much as possible
about this from the work done by CODESRIA and the Committee for Academic
Freedom in Africa.
And here at home we need to remember that it is not just
public institutions that are under attack. Anyone who is critical is under
attack. The shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, a democratic and
deeply principled organisation, has in recent months been subject to vicious
and blatantly criminal police violence and state repression.
It is clear that powerful forces are determined to close the
democratic spaces opened up in the transition to parliamentary democracy. A
new, dangerous and difficult era is upon us. Many of us who felt that the
transition didn't go far enough will now have to fight to defend its limited
gains as Zanufication gathers pace in our university, our city and our country.
Here at UKZN instead of developing a vision for the future
through collegial discussion, we are supposed to silently accept increasingly
bizarre propaganda by and for management. Instead of taking decisions through
genuine deliberation, we are supposed to accept dictatorship. Instead of
allowing the people who work here to have some say about how and why things are
done here we are expected to obey, without question, the decisions of
consultants who know nothing about the real value of what we do.
We must pay careful attention to the processes that disempower
us. This is because there is a great danger in seeing our situation as only
being the fault of a few specific individuals. It is true, of course, that we
have some particularly paranoid and vindictive individuals in management who
are doing particular damage to this institution. And it is true that they have
now lost the credibility needed to run this university with our consent. They
can now only rule by intimidation. But the crisis of this university is deeper
than the unacceptable authoritarianism of these individuals.
We already know how to think about this. We never made the
mistake of thinking that if only Botha had gone, apartheid would end. We should
not think that after Makgoba and Chetty are forced to resign, we will have won
the battle. We have made this mistake before.
At UDW, the sometimes militant struggles against various
authoritarian vice-chancellors simply paved the way for even more authoritarian
successors. And many times radicals in our own union have entered management and then quickly become some of the worst managers. This has
happened because we focussed too much on opposing the individuals in management
and did not take enough care to work out the principles by which a more
democratic and a more critical and a more just university could be run.
To avoid repeating this mistake, we need to make sure that
our union, the spaces in which we interact with other unions, and our
departments and schools become non-racial spaces run on the basis of honesty,
critical engagement with society, collegial decision making and respect for
each other and for the importance of teaching and scholarship.
We have to become the alternative and to develop principles
that we can use to change the institution from the bottom up. All
authoritarians, on the right and also, as we have learnt, on the left are at
their most terrified when ordinary women and men think and act for ourselves.
This is when they start their campaigns of slander and intimidation. Sometimes
they even start to work together against popular democratic spaces. It is our
duty to scare them stiff. The way for us to do this is to create spaces where
it is safe for us to think and speak for ourselves. If we make these spaces
open and honest then slander will not be an effective weapon. Lies thrive in
the dark and die in the light. Standing alone is very hard but if we are
together we can support each other and then we can't lose. Shackdwellers in
Durban have been able to do this and the people that make up this university
can do it too.
Of course they will fight back. They will try to weaken us
by scaring us. And they will scare us by slandering and threatening
disciplinary action against the individuals that they see as the 'trouble
makers' responsible for stirring up your anger. They will always assume that
you cannot think for yourselves and that the people that you elect and mandate
to speak for you are telling you what to think. I do not need to tell you that
our management rules in a very vindictive way. It has its little rituals that it
uses to pretend that it operates by the law, but they have nothing to do with
justice. They are just a performance to create the appearance of justice.
I had to get through 7 layers of security to get into my
hearing. My lawyer had to be smuggled on to the campus in the boot of a car.
And when I finally got to the hearing it was clear what its real purpose was. I
was denied legal representation. I had to choose a representative on the spot
and he was given 30 minutes to prepare to argue my case. Witnesses were scared
to tell the truth for fear of losing their jobs. The vice-chancellor
shamelessly stood outside the hearing personally intimidating a witness before
she entered. The chair of my hearing did not come to this dispute without
baggage. It was clear that someone who was authoritarian enough to have
enthusiastically supported Snuki Zikalala's crushing of independent journalism
at the SABC and Mbeki's AIDS denialism was never going to take the side of a
critical unionist against an authoritarian management.
I asked the chair, plainly and directly, to recuse herself
because her sustained support for anti-social authoritarianism made it
impossible for her to consider my case fairly. She refused. As you can see for
yourselves, her judgement doesn't have much connection to the evidence that was
actually led and debated. She wasn't even able to spell my name or that of my
representative correctly. But the management paid a piper whose tune they knew
very well and liked very much.
And so I was fired. And now out and out libel is being
spread in the newspapers – libel that goes way beyond what is actually asserted
in the judgement.
The lawyers and other experts who have looked at the
judgement and the transcript from the hearing have told me that it is impossible
for me to lose in court. So I will go to court and I will win in court.
But it is clear that the management is willing to accept
regular losses in court. They recently lost their case against Olujimi Adesina,
who pointed out the similarities between the University's management practices
and apartheid practices. The court took Adesina's side.
Management shrugs this off, and makes us pay the bill. For
them, trying to shut people up is an ordinary cost of business. This is a price
they are prepared to pay to be able to keep intimidating us. We will continue
to win in the courts but although these victories are and will continue to be
important, we will not win the battle for the soul of UKZN in the courts. The
battle for the soul of UKZN will be won at UKZN by the every day choices of the
workers, academics and students at UKZN.
I don't yet know what work I will find. But I know that I
will continue to learn, study and teach at the University that the shack
dwellers have created for themselves, the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo.
I am sure that the shack dwellers are not the only people creating their own
democratic spaces as public spaces are increasingly crushed under managerial
authoritarianism and given over to the market. If your struggles at UKZN are
successful then one day spaces like the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo
will be able to reconnect with the University of KwaZulu-Natal. If your
struggles are not successful then the University will steadily become another
weapon to be used against ordinary people by the state, imperial donors and big
business. The stakes are high.
For years, we have shouted 'Amandla!' and replied 'Awethu!'
It is critically important to remember that the power really is ours. Although
the authoritarians will target us, will lie about us, will slander us, will
make deals behind our backs and then stab us in the back, we can be stronger
than they are because we are many and they are few.
I have often been frightened through this process. It was
very difficult to tell my children that I had been fired. It was also very
difficult to tell my parents. I now have no way of bringing a salary home for
my children. I have no medical aid if they fall sick. But I am not alone and
that has kept me strong.
I would like to thank my family, the ordinary members of
COMSA, the Freedom of Expression Institute, the Committee for Academic Freedom
in Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo and all the other trade unionists and
academics at UKZN, around South Africa, and from Lagos to Istanbul to Boston,
who supported me while this hearing dragged on. Every sms, every phone call,
every email, every visit, every prayer in every tradition and every song has
mattered. I deeply appreciate the personal and political support.
Make sure that no one who is targeted for speaking out is
alone. That is the best way to take away the management's power to intimidate.
Through receiving unexpected support and being unexpectedly
betrayed I have learned important lessons about courage and cowardice,
principled commitment and opportunism. It is clear that we can't make easy
assumptions about who will stand, who will waiver and who will turn on the
basis of the political language that people speak. I have learnt the hard way
that sometimes left and right authoritarianism, which both want to think and
act for everyone else, will even unite against projects in which ordinary women
and men think and act for themselves. I have learnt the hard way that it is
what people do that matters, not what they say about themselves. It is everyday
practice that matters.
The way to build an everyday practice that can build and
sustain an alternative to corporate authoritarianism is to, as we began to do
during the strike, build communities of struggle where people can think and
discuss and speak out together. When we are together we can support each other
when they try to slander us and discipline us in the name of the reputation of
the university when our only crime is to have stated that obvious - that our
emperors are naked.
My new email address is ihashiliyadlala@gmail.com
Please keep in touch.
Good luck.
Fazel Khan
