Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande says Unisa is suffering from financial maladministration
The Unisa council has four separate legal challenges against Advanced Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande as it fights against dispersion.
Advanced education prophet Ishmael Mnisi verified to News24 that the department was bogged in the four cases in its ongoing battle with the council of the 450 000- pupil-strong tertiary institution.
Unisa’s attorneys hope that the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria will grant the draft order they prepared, which puts the thickets put on Nzimande’s plans to remove the current council and put Unisa under administration, pending the outgrowth of a review operation
Appointing an director forms part of an independent assessor’s report into contended misbehavior at Unisa.
According to its speaker, Mashukudu James Maboa, the Unisa council wants to review and set away Nzimande’s decision, taken about three weeks agone
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The minister, explaining his decision in a letter dated 4 August, said Unisa was riddled with” fiscal and other maladministration”, an illustration of which was a R176 million pay envelope bill that Nzimande said equated to 78 of the institution’s total expenditure.
Nzimande also said the council was” replete with fiscal irregularities” and demanded ties of” a deep understanding of the advanced education enterprise.”
But Maboa, on behalf of the council, said the body launched its review operation because it had a” statutory accreditation” in terms of the Higher Education Act to” cover the institutional integrity of the university”.
In his launching affidavit, Maboa added that the Act’s preamble handed for tertiary institutions to” enjoy freedom and autonomy in their relationship with the state within the environment of public responsibility”, adding that Nzimande’s plans to apply the assessor’s recommendation of disbanding the council were” unseasonable”.
It will not be the first time an institution takes Nzimande to court over his plans to put it under administration.
In 2012, Central University of Technology, also led by Professor Thandwa Mthembu, took Nzimande to court and won.
Mnisi told News24 the department had” four cases that we’ve to respond to on Unisa”. He couldn’t be drawn into revealing the nature of the cases.
opining on the current review operation of the assessor’s report, Mnisi said” I can not partake any information on this case for now as we’re yet to appear in court on it.”