At around five fifteen on 22 May 2018, Professor Gregory Kamwendo parked his car outside a flat in Empangeni, a beautifully situated town overlooking the Indian Ocean in the north-eastern part of KwaZulu-Natal. Malawian-born, he was an accomplished scholar in the field of sociolinguistics and dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Zululand (UZ). The man who pumped bullets into Kamwendo's upper body as he sat in the parked car on that fateful Tuesday evening was an inkabi (assassin). He had been hired by a taxi owner, Oscar Mthiyane, who himself had been called out of the blue to arrange the murder. The caller was Selby Nkuna, a one-time lecturer at the University of Zululand. The 53-year-old professor died bleeding in his car as the two men sped away in a getaway car driven by Mthiyane. On 29 November 2018 detectives arrested Mthiyane and Nkuna, and in October 2020 the two killers were sentenced to life in prison.

Why would a university lecturer murder an academic dean? Quite simply, because the dean was disrupting a revenue stream that enriched the lecturer. Kamwendo had exposed a fraudulent PhD operation in which the university allegedly sold poorly printed doctoral diplomas. It did not help that there was already bad blood between the two men because Kamwendo had testified in an arbitration case against Nkuna for physically assaulting a student. Nkuna had threatened to send Kamwendo ‘back to Malawi in a coffin’. The murder took place in the context of institutional dysfunction, as one statement so poignantly captured: ‘In grieving the loss of a man of such principle and integrity, we call for justice, not just in prosecuting his murderers but in addressing the institutional and system-level dynamics that his murder draws attention to.’

INSTITUTIONALISED CORRUPTION OF THE ACADEMIC ENTERPRISE

The PhD scandal was matched by a much bigger case of certificate fraud at UZ in 2016. An investigation there showed that as many as 4 000 people might have paid for their degrees over a period of twenty years. Between 400 and 500 of those certificates appeared to involve teaching qualifications. In one instance, five staff members made R260 000 selling 15 fake degrees. About 80 students were deregistered after it was found they did not even have matric (school-leaving) certificates.