• The SIU is now investigating the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape over potential “serious maladministration.”
• This is part of a wider investigation that includes the national Department of Transport and the Limpopo Department of Sports.
• The university is being investigated over potential maladministration of funds and if it disbursed any titles to people who didn’t deserve them.

The question should be what isn’t the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) busy with, as the corruption-sniffing agency is now adding the Department of Transport, the Limpopo Department of Sports, and Fort Hare University in the Eastern Cape to its list of ongoing investigations.

As for Fort Hare, the SIU has been given the green light by President Cyril Ramaphosa to investigate a series of alleged serious maladministration at the Eastern Cape university that potentially took place from 1st January 2004 to 1st November 2012 – a period of eight years.

Among the issues investigated by the SIU, includes the installation of CCTV cameras and associated security features at a university staff village in Alice in the province from 18th March 2022 to 2nd June 2023, as well as the refurbishment and maintenance of student residents at the university’s campus in Alice.

Additionally, the SIU will be sniffing out all related material and documents from that time period to identify any maladministration regarding the payment of allowances for food, accommodation, books, stationery, cash and study-related costs to qualifying students.

Most seriously for previous attendees of the institute, the SIU will also be investigating if the University of Fort Hare has bestowed Bachelor’s degrees, honours, Master’s or PhD’s to any student who was not actually eligible for these titles, as well as if the university has admitted any students during the investigation period who should not have been.

“This includes persons who did not have the requisite degrees or Matriculation results to enrol for, study for or be awarded the degrees in question,” it said in a statement.

The SIU has had a good track record in sniffing out hidden stashes of secrets within universities. Earlier this year. In May 2023, the SIU recovered R350 million in unallocated NSFAS funds just sitting in universities across the country, with a fat stack of R300 million recovered from the University of Johannesburg (UJ) alone.

While UJ aided the SIU with the investigation and was not directly implicated in anything shady, it goes to show that the SIU specialise in finding issues where others see none, especially when it comes to the books.