Both sides now: UCT’s leadership crisis looking like a ‘hit job’?

UCT Vice-Chancellor Prof Mosa Moshabela has taken his own university and Council to the Western Cape High Court, accusing them of withholding a report into 34 complaints against him for months, despite Council's own investigation finding none warranted disciplinary action. Court papers show broken written promises of a hearing, a copy of the report and procedural fairness, and reveal that a widely reported "Forest Hill" complaint was, in fact, a welfare check requested by a staff member's mother, who later expressed thanks. Seven Council members have separately alleged some complaints were fabricated. Council chair Adv Norman Arendse says he acted in UCT's best interests..By Marika Sboros*.There’s a Joni Mitchell song about looking at the same things – clouds, love, life – “from both sides now” and finding that each side tells a different truth.Court files can be just like that.Proof is in, of all places, the very public PR battle suddenly raging around the head of Prof Mosa Moshabela, Vice-Chancellor (VC) of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It erupted after he filed papers in the Western Cape High Court on August 5, 2026, against his own university and Council, UCT’s supreme governing body. The timing of the PR war looks, at best, like the start of a co-ordinated campaign exposing “yet another” VC damaging UCT’s stellar reputation, at worst, like a hit job against him. Moshabela’s application was issued in court on August 5. On August 6, UCT emailed it to Council members. On August 7, Daily Maverick ran an “exclusive report” by journalist, Rebecca Davis, on the filing that, with annexures, runs to 157 pages. Whatever the intent, the report and headline reflecting “a VC in court” alongside “34 complaints” and “secrets” make for queasy legal reading given the likely effects of the innuendo on his reputation.So does the fact that court papers show that Moshabela is not the keeper of secrets here. The filing clearly states that he is suing UCT and Council for keeping very big secrets from him for months on end. In particular, for repeatedly refusing to show him the report into their investigations of 34 “complaints” against him.The complaints are problematic on their own. They started at 39 and arrived as 34 on Council’s doorstep through UCT Ombud Nerisha Abrahams. Most were sorted into a category dubbed “Evaluative Relationships”, ranging from alleged abuse of power to disputed performance reviews. Six did not fit under that umbrella. Three were filed as sexual harassment, two as discrimination based on culture and one as gender discrimination..Just six wordsThe use of the word, complaints, is itself problematic, since each one in the schedule put to Council averaged just six words. And since Moshabela’s legal team states plainly in an annexed demand in court papers: “Not one of the complaints our client faced was ever established against him. Not one produced a disciplinary charge.”In a related development, seven high-profile UCT Council members released a public letter expressing concern over “fabricated complaints” against Moshabela. They say that some “so-called complainants simply do not exist – they were made up”. In other instances, “persons registered as complainants by the Ombud have made it clear that they did not lodge any such complaints”.To call the letter damning is to understate it. They accuse Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC of putting UCT and Council at “legal and reputational risk” over his handling of the matter. A PoliticsWeb report by Dr Elsa van Huyssteen, a South African scholar, legal professional, and former advocate of the Cape Town Bar, is similarly seminal.Van Huyssteen leaves no doubt as to why UCT appointed Moshabela in the first place, starting with his academic pedigree, taken from UCT’s own website. It bears repeating.He holds an MBChB from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a Diploma in HIV from the Colleges of Medicine of South Africa, a Master’s in Family Medicine from the University of Limpopo, a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, an MSc in Demography & Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and is a professor of public health.He served as deputy VC for research and innovation at KwaZulu-Natal University from 2021 until 2024, when he was appointed UCT VC. During that time, his portfolio covered research management, development, ethics and integrity, capacity building, innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer and commercialisation. He is the recipient of major awards for his work, currently leads the Quality Health Systems and Transformation Centre in South Africa, a collaboration with Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health, and is a faculty member in HIV, Infectious Disease and Global Health Research Institute at the University of Washington in St Louis. Why the ‘persecution’?Van Huyssteen raises crucial questions, including why Council is going after an accomplished VC, who has “by all accounts been running the (UCT) efficiently and successfully”, and why he is being subjected to “efforts to hound him out of office”.In a nutshell, she asks: "Why is Council persecuting him?"That’s all the more poignant and pressing given a video of UCT welcoming Moshabela at his official inauguration as the institution's 11th VC on November 25, 2025. In it Arendse expansively declares, “Today is UCT at its best.”Court papers are equally critical of UCT and Council, showing that Council itself ordered the investigation that showed that none of the 34 complaints against him had any merit. That should have closed the case against Moshabela. Instead, as the filing shows, Council held a sudden weekend meeting on May 30, 2026, focused on the report, without him present. Resolutions ordered executive coaching for Moshabela alone, based on the report, and launched new investigations based on further unnamed “concerns”.When Moshabela asked to see the report, court papers shows that UCT and Council refused to provide it, citing confidentiality and privacy concerns..‘Broken promises’The filing is clear on who kept secrets, promised openness, in writing, and then broke that promise.On December 1, 2025, Arendse emailed Moshabela the text he intended to place before Council, in his words, “in controlled circumstances aimed at minimising the possibility of leaks”. Council adopted that text days later as the terms of reference for itself as the body designing the investigation. Arendse effectively promised Moshabela five things: procedural fairness; a copy of the report Council would consider; a hearing before any way forward was decided; recovery of his legal costs if no disciplinary action followed; and no recommendation of precautionary suspension without first hearing him.By May 30, 2026, none of those promises remained intact.Council, according to the filing, continues to act on a report Moshabela has never seen, decide the way forward without hearing him and refuse his every request for it.It has also only belatedly shone its scrutiny onto the Ombud’s conduct. Press reports treat the secrecy in this case as ambient fact. The filing gives it the author, date and front-and-centre dominance it warrants.On April 2, 2026, five days before Moshabela first sat before investigators, and almost two months before any report existed, attorneys assisting the investigation recorded in writing that the report would be compiled for Council before Moshabela had seen it.The rest was left to Council’s discretion, which has since meant ongoing refusal.Moshabela answered investigators’ questions anyway. The filing shows that his attorneys’ first act, on March 23, 2026, was to pledge in writing his intention “to engage fully and constructively with the investigation process”. His April 9 interview ran more than two hours beyond schedule, extended by the investigators themselves.For a year, therefore, UCT’s VC went along with his own Council’s process.Mystery complaintsThe Daily Maverick report claims that court papers do not explain what became of some of the complaints, including those categorised as sexual harassment and discrimination.The court filing gives a prosaic answer. Council’s Resolution 2 records that no disciplinary proceedings be instituted in respect of any of the 34 complaints. The only “complaint” with names and faces behind it is the so-called “Forest Hill matter”, an incident outside of the initial 39 “complaint”. In her report, Davis also claims that court papers “do not reveal the source of this complaint”. That’s not surprising since there was no complaint, as court papers show.Forest Hill is a UCT staff accommodation area. The “complaint” claim arose on November 13, 2025, after staffer Dr Zama Mkhize’s mother became concerned when she repeatedly could not reach her daughter. She called Moshabela’s office and asked that someone check on her.Moshabela instructed Campus Protection Services officer Grant De Monk to check on her at her residence at Forest Hill. De Monk, accompanied by another official, entered using a master key, and found Mkhize asleep and safe. She explained that she’d been unwell for some days.Even the respondents’ correspondence in Moshabela’s filing consistently calls Forest Hill an “incident”, never a complaint. No complainant appears in the papers.No complainantsAs court papers show, Mkhize never complained. Her mother never complained, and instead, conveyed thanks. And the Forest Hill incident is the only matter behind Council’s further investigation running alongside everything else.Investigators also knew about the incident during the original investigation but never put it to Moshabela. He first heard of it formulated as in need of a response in a letter demanding his availability at a Council meeting on three days’ notice.The letter disclosed that De Monk had already been interviewed and attributed an instruction to Moshabela. Thus, the account implicating him was on file before he even knew it existed.Davis’s “gotcha moment”, if you like, that Moshabela appears to have produced “no evidence” that the mother conveyed her thanks, ends up not being one.His affidavit explains why. He avoided approaching the three people who could confirm his account – the officer, the resident and her mother – because each is a potential witness in Council’s own investigation. He did so because he did not wish to expose them, or himself, “to any suggestion of interference”; He was similarly respectful of the resident’s privacy.Any litigant in a live investigation might reasonably think twice before approaching potential witnesses.Missing month foundAllusions to a “missing” month in June between Council’s resolutions and the court application also miss the point. Court papers fill in the gaps, letter by letter, date by date. These include an undertaking by UCT to respond by June 17 that was never honoured; a collective refusal by UCT and Council on June 24 withholding the report as “a confidential Council process”, with blanket privilege claimed and no undertaking to place the correspondence before Council.A formal demand on July 2 accepted redaction of confidential identities, meeting UCT’s stated obstacle. On July 3, the claimed difficulty was “strict confidential conditions” requiring an in-person meeting. By July 9, it had become Council members on leave.All this from a Council that convened itself on a Saturday and gave its VC three days’ notice for an interview. On these papers, the urgency runs one way only.Déjà vu? read to the endUndeterred, Davis has gone on to make serious, potentially defamatory allegations against Moshabela, unconstrained by court papers, on the Clement Manyathela Show on Radio 702.Read more:.UCT's 35% medical-aid cut for retirees exposes its denials of financial crisis.Yet any framing of a “déjà vu at UCT” and attempted parallels of Moshabela with controversy surrounding his predecessor omits the ending of its own story. That era closed with an independent investigation finding “serious governance failures”.Déjà vu would be an institution repeating its mistake.Governance is the Council's mandated duty. Its resolutions are now before the High Court. The question that the full court filing poses is not, as some reports suggest, whether UCT is saddled with yet another difficult VC.It’s why a process ending without a single charge keeps being extended, in confidence, against the one person it concerns, in breach of promises that UCT Council’s own Chair put in writing.Arendse, predictably, has come out fighting on UCT’s website, declaring that he and Council have acted throughout only in UCT’s “best interests”.The court papers are in the public domain. They are best read slowly, in detail, on both sides now, without rushing to get “exclusives”..* Marika Sboros is a freelance journalist. Follow her on X and on Substack.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here. 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Both sides now: UCT’s leadership crisis looking like a ‘hit job’?

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