Fort Hare: The story behind the flames of fury with the VC - Grant Abbott

An estimated half a billion rands worth of damages have been caused to the historic Fort Hare University following violent protests and arson. In his latest BizNews interview, Grant Abbott, the General Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, tells Chris Steyn why Fort Hare cannot be rebuilt with VC Professor Sakhela Buhlungu still in place. “It is clear not just from right now, but for five, six, seven years of this VC's tenure that there is gross irregularities and corruption going on. As in very recent, right in the middle of all of the corruption, he appoints someone who is implicated in the SIU report as being possibly corrupt…He has a history of surrounding himself, unfortunately, with dodgy characters. And we know that by the fact that all of the 24, 25 people who stand accused at the moment were all appointed while he was the Vice Chancellor…" Abbott adds that the VC's management style is to "hold all stakeholders at arm's length and not to engage..He runs the university like it's his own private company. He thinks it's his own spaza shop, whatever it is, and he can do what he wants.”

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