COSATU: Hands off the CCS!
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By Dennis Brutus and Patrick Bond
August 6, 2008 -- Durban's University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba is expected to deliver an edict that the Centre for Civil Society will close on December 31. The reason given by dean Donal McCracken to a sceptical School of Development Studies (where the centre is housed) is that staff do not have "permanent" funding. But neither do most of the university's research units, and there is money in centre reserves for at least a couple of years, plus ongoing donor support for many of our projects.
Hence this "execution" will be doggedly resisted because UKZN still has many staff and students who remember the struggle for non-racial democracy and don't mind speaking out to challenge misguided decisions.
As the two most senior academics in the centre, holding an honorary professorship and tenured research chair, respectively, we will resist, despite what a UKZN internal report recorded -- an environment of "intimidation and bullying", in which management "deploys power rather than intellect", as Rhodes professor Jimi Adesina put it.
The decision is misguided for many reasons, not least for overturning the official recommendation of a five-month University Research Review finalised in February, which advocated strengthening the centre and giving it more autonomy: "Closing down or removing the centre from UKZN does not appear to be an option as it was rejected by all interviewees and panel members. Through its international recognition and standing, the centre has put UKZN on a world map in social science, a position the university dare not risk to lose."
Newsmakers
On the local map, the centre has offered nearly 100 free events a year, including seminars, conferences, micro film festivals, literary celebrations and the Harold Wolpe Lecture, Durban's main lecture series.
In Howard College, several hundred community residents join academics on the last Thursday of each month to debate newsmakers and intellectuals, global and local -- such as, this year, commentator Xolela Mangcu, Soweto activist Trevor Ngwane, filmmaker John Pilger, Kenyan feminist Eunice Sahle and Zimbabwe democracy activists Judith Todd and Joy Mabengwe, as well as local anti-xenophobia campaigners Baruti Amisi, Pierre Matate and Orlean Naidoo.
Among our inspirations is Fatima Meer, whom we host this Sunday in Chatsworth in celebration of her 80 years of commitment and wisdom, as well as her decade of support to the "new social movements" in the original Concerned Citizens Forum which in 1998 helped renew urban justice advocacy across South Africa.
Meer's Wolpe lecture last year called for a progressive, post-nationalist liberatory politics to emerge from the grassroots, like the creative spark generated in 2001 when the World Social Forum in Brazil rose against the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
With our centre's assistance, the Social Movement Indaba network and Diakonia Council of Churches hosted a local equivalent in January, drawing 400 community and labour leaders. Among those present were many who resisted Inanda Dam displacement, Treatment Action Campaigners and Congolese inner-city traders who hang in against all odds.
Evidence of abuse in the authorities' diktat to shut the centre ranges from a flawed process, to extreme race and gender implications, since contract termination affects a dozen black staff, most of whom are working class. The only paid staffer who should retain his job, McCracken told us, is the sole white expatriate (a writer of this article, Bond, whose government research subsidies more than pay his salary).
In addition to UKZN's threat to this centre and a generation of new critical scholars, a great deal of concrete research activity is now at risk.
UKZN claims it has South Africa's "second best" research profile (after the University of Pretoria).
A modest contribution comes from our centre staff's peer-reviewed articles, chapters and books -- 58 in 2007 with an average 50 a year since 2005 (and no, these fortnightly Mercury columns don't count) -- which rank us at the top of the university, measured per academic employee.
High productivity arises from documenting and interrogating the social laboratories of Durban, South Africa, Africa and the world, where contradictions generated by globalisation and the flawed character of post-colonial politics create conflict.
We have sought sites and research areas -- climate, energy, water/sanitation, global and national political economy, survival strategies and community philanthropy, the rise of social movements in Africa -- where these contradictions tell us more about society, politics, economy, gender, race, environment and other social relations than we would normally get from our academic armchairs.
Conflicts
Beyond merely trying to understand the conflicts, serious scholars will contribute to addressing them in a non-violent manner, such as through international legal strategies that the other writer of this article, Brutus, contributes to.
He does this with the Jubilee and the Khulumani Support Group, aiming for US$400 billion (R2951billion) in reparations to be paid by apartheid-era US and EU corporations -- which hopefully will frighten them enough to think twice about their next investment in the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma and the like.
The danger of the centre's approach to knowledge production, "praxis", is that the research generated sometimes threatens the privileges of power.
Two years ago, the same authorities banned Ashwin Desai from continuing employment at the centre and at UKZN, amidst a haze of confusion and weak excuses. We lost a major Human Sciences Research Council "Race and Redress" grant as a result of this interference. In 2003, the US Agency for International Development retracted a multimillion-rand donation after centre founder Adam Habib spoke out against the Iraq war.
That sort of style the centre encouraged from the outset: honest and courageous, combining the left brain's love of rigorous detail, and the left side of the body's beating heart.
UKZN management has stabbed this centre, but it cannot be allowed to die.
So this is really all about politics, and whether a university can host a critical mass of professional academics and community scholars devoted to social justice.
The formal appeal against CCS's closure is posted here http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,68,3,1575#letter
If you have testimonials about the wisdom of closing CCS, please let us know, at dennisbrutus2002@yahoo.com and pbond@mail.ngo.za and these will be posted at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs. [Please post them in the comments box below as well.]
[Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal. Dennis Brutus is a veteran anti-apartheid activist, having been jailed on Robben Island, as well as being a renowned poet. This article first appeared in the Durban Mercury at http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4544608.]
Dear University of KwaZulu Natal authorities
On behalf of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, an affiliate of the Anti-Privatisation Forum, I would like to put on record our shock and feeling of outrage at the news that you are planning to close down the Centre for Civil Society. From what we have gathered on this matter and our own experience of working with this institute we strongly believe that this is a politically motivated attack on progressive and relevant scholarship. What a shame! What is happening to our country? At a time when South African society finds itself in a crisis of legitimacy, leadership, socio-economic security and political stability, we need clear-headed, relevant and committed scholarship that will shed light on the issues and suggest viable and just solutions. Instead the UKZN management is deciding to unilaterally close down one of the few remaining centres of committed and progressive scholarship in the country.
CCS has over the years given grassroots organisations such as ours support and hope that the academic establishment can and sometimes does contribute to the struggle to stop the rich richer and the poor poorer; and taht it can and sometimes does conduct research aimed at improving the lives of the poorest of the poor. CCS's work indicated to us that academic institutions are not mere ivory towers conducting work that benefits the ruling class and the rich. For example, the CCS's Prof Patrick Bond made expert submissions in the recent court case to assure water for all. The community of Phiri, organised by our organisation, and getting support from the Coalition Against Water Privatisation, won the court case against pre-paid water meters. Judge Moroa Tsoka ruled that pre-paid water meters are unlawful and unconstitutional and are a violation of human rights. CCS has also given crucial support to communities around Durban under attack from oil-producing companies which are intent on making profits at great cost to the environment and threatening people's lives.
CCS has also organised ground breaking research into social movements such as ours, the Treatment Action Campaign and others, research that helped our organisations to understand themselves and the context in which we operate thus helping us in strengthening our struggles.
We urge you to reconsider your decision of closing down the CCS. We see this as nothing else but an attack on the struggle to better the lives of the working class and the poor through research. We also see it as an attempt to divorce academic scholarship from the problems faced by millions and millions of ordinary people ground by the pro-big business neoliberal policies of the government. We say: Hands off the CCS!
Thank you.
Yours in struggle
Trevor Ngwane, organiser of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee
COSATU is dismayed to hear that the University of KwaZulu-Natal is considering closing its world-renowned Centre for Civil Society (CCS) on 31 December 2008 for what sound like paltry and quite possibly spurious reasons – that staff do not have "permanent" funding.
The CCS's objective is "to advance socio-economic and environmental justice by developing critical knowledge about, for and in dialogue with, civil society through teaching, research and publishing" It was established at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in July 2001, with the mission of "promoting the study of South African civil society as a legitimate, flourishing area of scholarly activity". A related goal was "to develop partnerships within civil society aimed at capacity-building, knowledge sharing, and generating reflection and debate".
All such research institutions as the CCS are precious to COSATU, especially those like the CCS that are products of the 1994 democratic breakthrough, and not relics of the apartheid past.
The working class, which is the largest, most technically, socially and politically advanced component of civil society in our country, is acutely aware of the value of intellectual labour. COSATU sincerely hopes that the university administrators who want to close the CCS will quickly realise their mistake and instead of muttering threats, will now support this valuable institution.
If there is a genuine problem of finding funds for the unit, the government must step in to fund this important institution.
For more information on the CCS, please visit the CCS website at http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,5,1633
Patrick Craven (National Spokesperson) Congress of South African Trade Unions
1-5 Leyds Cnr Biccard Streets Braamfontein, 2017
P.O. Box 1019 Johannesburg, 2000 SOUTH AFRICA
Tel: +27 11 339-4911/24 Fax: +27 11 339-5080/6940/ 086 603 9667 Cell: 0828217456 E-Mail: patrick@cosatu.org.za