Johannesburg - As the hunt for a suitable candidate to replace Professor Adam Habib as vice-chancellor of Wits University continues, an unlikely source has jumped to the defence of the institution’s outgoing boss.
After giving Habib a headache while SRC president at Wits, Mcebo Dlamini said it was the wrong time for the academic to leave his position.
Reacting to the news that Habib has resigned from his position as Wits vice-chancellor, Dlamini said on Tuesday that the principal still had a lot of work to do at the institution.
Habib is leaving his position in December, three years early, and will be joining the UK-based School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in January next year.
Dlamini said: “Our relationship with Adam was one of love and hate. It was never personal. We represented the interests of students and Adam represented management so it was bound to have conflicts and clashes.”
Dlamini, who had a number of public spats with Habib during the #FeesMustFall protests, said the vice-chancellor was the perfect man to deal with the chaos at the institution.
“Nobody except Adam would have managed 2015/16. In as much as he used police brutality and everything else he used, no one else would have been able to do that. We knew that the man was a humanitarian and a pan-Africanist but the job called him to divorce what he believed in. That frustrated us and that is why we fought him the way he did,” Dlamini said.
He said Habib should have finished his second term at Wits and seen his plans to fruition.
“He leaves Wits at the wrong time.We had a 2030 plan to expand Wits, to expand the whole of Braamfontein. We don’t know if they will divorce that plan. He leaves at a time when we were pushing curriculum change.
"We wanted to review the degrees offered because some are irrelevant for the market. We were in that transition,” Dlamini said.
Habib said he would use his last nine months in office to plan the Wits centenary celebrations.
“Wits is turning 100 years old in 2022 and at the heart is setting up a student endowment fund where we want to spend an enormous amount of money on missing-middle students to come to Wits without debt.”
He said while the #FeesMustFall protests were part of his legacy, he stood for what was right. “There is no doubt that fees must fall was a significant part of the last six/seven years. It was important in many ways.
“I also think the way some students leaders and political parties conducted themselves threatened public institutions. I rose to the defence of public institutions, I made no apologies for it. I worked in the interest of the majority and not the minority,” Habib said.
Habib said he was leaving a strong institution for his successor. “If you gauge success by what politicians say then we haven’t done well. But if you gauge success by how you judge universities in the world, research, graduates, we are very strong. In 2019, we enrolled more than 15000 postgraduates. Finances are stable.”
He said while looking forward to his new job, he would miss Wits.
"Wits was more than a job for me. It was a political passion. I have always said that if this country were to transform, Wits has to be at the heart of it. Every good thing comes to an end. I have to leave,” he said.