Right of reply: Governance, integrity are central to Wilgenhof reckoning, so Stellenbosch council chair had to go

Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s recent Opinionista piece on the Wilgenhof residence scandal earns attention because of her stature and commitment to facilitating the settlement in the dispute between Wilgenhof and Stellenbosch University. However, her take on the call by former chancellors Edwin Cameron and Johann Rupert for the end of council chair Nicky Newton-King’s term seems to place good governance and honesty at odds with transformation – which is mistaken.

First, the merits of the council’s ill-fated attempt to close Wilgenhof are irrelevant to Cameron’s and Rupert’s point about honesty and integrity on council.

Gobodo-Madikizela fears “that [their] absolutist stance demanding that the council chair step down shuts down a crucial conversation” on “a transformative institutional culture” – yet the former chancellors rightly don’t refer to the original Wilgenhof controversy at all. Their concern is integrity and good governance.

Is that at odds with transformation at Stellenbosch? Or essential to it?

The suggestion that transformation should be distinct from, or even insulated against, public demands for probity, honesty and good governance is troubling.

Gobodo-Madikizela is right that institutions are more than their governance structures – they are lived cultures. Yet cultures do not float free of power. They are shaped, enabled and protected by those who hold authority. When leaders interfere in honest governance processes, when they alter reports under pressure, withhold important facts from decision-making bodies and blur accountability lines, leadership integrity becomes inseparable from institutional culture itself.

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To regard calls for an honest leadership as a superficial or secondary response risks underestimating how deeply leadership sets the moral tone for an entire institution.

The independent panel led by retired Constitutional Court Justice Johann Kriegler found former rector Wim de Villiers and Newton-King guilty of grave lapses of judgement and candour.

Newton-King was found to be an active and/or knowing participant in the surreptitious and contrived amendment of the original Wilgenhof Report. She procured the changes through a “simulated transaction” in a process that “was fatally flawed”. She was duty bound to alert the council yet failed to do so – failing to disclose “material information that could have influenced the outcome of council deliberations”. Then Newton-King sought to advance reasons for not fulfilling her duty of disclosure that Kriegler and his panel denounced as “palpably illogical”.

Both De Villiers and Newton-King severely damaged trust in the council and the university.

Gobodo-Madikizela rightly values dialogue, but dialogue demands trust. And trust depends on a shared belief that processes are fair and free from underhand manipulation. If those leading an institution are found to have compromised probity, then calls for dialogue may seem hollow, diversionary, even coercive.

Read more: Wounds of the father: the Stellenbosch legacy of trauma

Students and staff who feel harmed or were falsely accused of racism – as Wilgenhof’s students were – may reasonably ask: dialogue on whose terms, and under what guarantees of good faith?

In these circumstances, the former chancellors’ call for leadership renewal is not an exercise in “power” or ”authority”, but a reaffirmation of conditions under which dialogue can be credible. High ethical standards are not a concession to elite pressure, they are a defence against it.

Institutions that fail to directly confront governance breakdowns also tend to cycle endlessly through symbolic conversations about values, while the structural conditions that undermine trust remain intact.

Read more: It may be surprising and quaint today, but my experience at Wilgenhof was liberating

So it cannot be right or fair to suggest that “demanding that the council chair step down shuts down a crucial conversation”. In fact, if we do not publicly demand and then secure trustworthy leadership, any transformation will founder on crumbling foundations.

There is a further consideration. Institutional culture doesn’t affect only students and staff. Universities are also constituted by alumni, by funders, by the broader public. They too have a stake in public accountability. Constructive dialogue must engage them as well.

Gobodo-Madikizela complains that Cameron “did not initiate an internal institutional dialogue about these concerns” before taking part in “litigation against the university”. This is a profound misstatement. Cameron kept his distance, as chancellor, until it became unavoidable for him to act to avert an underhand injustice.

As he set out under oath – in facts that De Villiers and Newton-King could not contest – he made sustained efforts from June 2024 onward to engage in dialogue with both De Villiers and Newton-King, trying to find an internal resolution. His efforts were fruitless. Only then did he feel compelled to file an affidavit in October 2024. By then it was clear that the council would not settle the litigation with all parties and the matter would proceed to the high court.

Cameron confined his affidavit to governance failures, withholding any view on whether the council was right to attempt to shut the residence down.

Kriegler’s report of November 2024 made devastating findings on De Villiers’s and Newton-King’s conduct and integrity. It remains inexplicable that they did not resign. And any of Stellenbosch University’s many stakeholders are entitled to call for a compromised chair to step down. Fortunately, since Cameron and Rupert’s call, Newton-King has decided not to seek re-election either as chair or council member.

Read more: There is common ground to be found in the next chapter of Wilgenhof’s history

I am myself a former Wilgenhof resident. I am filled with hope when Gobodo-Madikizela speaks of the “quiet imagination of the Wilgenhof students’ leadership in this moment of reckoning offer[ing] a far more hopeful and accountable vision for the future of an inclusive Stellenbosch University”.

May they lead us in a form of institutional renewal where accountability and integrity are loudly stated as primary and unnegotiable. DM