WSU students losing out, says VC

Protesting Walter Sisulu University students are putting their academic reputation at risk, says vice-chancellor Rob Midgely.

Addressing a press briefing in East London on Friday, he said the university had lost approximately eight days of academic teaching and would have to find ways of reeling in the backlog.

“The sad thing here is not just about the academic time that has been lost, but the academic reputation to students’ qualifications. That is what they do not think of when they go on strike and behave in such a violent way. The reputation of their degrees is at stake,” he said.

He said students were ambassadors for their academic qualifications.

“This kind of behaviour is undermining their own ability to be employed. It is sad that that they do not think further than they want to do right now,” he said.

Midgely said the university had paid NSFAS allowances to the majority of the student beneficiaries and those who had not been paid, either did not qualify or submitted invalid banking details.

“The university has 18,362 students who are NSFAS beneficiaries and up to date, a total of 12,596 of them have received their allowances. That is a substantial number. That leaves approximately 5,767 students who have not been paid out,” he said.

They had not submitted their banking details and “therefore we cannot pay them”, he said.

Midgely said there was another group involved and the university was in a process of verifying their banking details.

“They submitted their details too late this week for processing. We have undertaken to pay them on Monday,” he said.

Midgely said a further 1,196 students from Mthatha and Buffalo City campuses were being processed for bursaries when the protest broke out.

“The process could not be completed because our staff are not on campus. Although we are ready, we cannot do so. Those payments are on hold until we have normalised the situation,” he said.

“With all the figures I have given, that leaves us with 3,962 students who have not been processed in any form whatsoever.

That amounts to 21.5% of the students who qualified,” he said.

Midgely dismissed claims that the university was withholding payments.

“Our job is to perform what we need to do. We make payments. We want peace on our campus. We will do whatever we can to process those outstanding numbers,” he said.

He said by Friday, the university had paid out a total of R65m to qualifying students across the four campuses.

“We had a meeting on Wednesday. The SRC leadership was there. We made all this information available to them, but they did not want to believe us, they did not want to accept the facts we are giving out right now,” he said.

He said there was substantial disruption at both Mthatha and Buffalo City campuses, “that is why we took a decision to close the campuses”, he said.