In the classic Western movie, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, three rugged cowboys circle a grave in which a fortune is buried. The tension lies in the question: what does each of them know?
In the Wild West of UCT governance, we have a Vice-Chancellor (VC), Prof Mosa Moshabela, who relied on statutory protections designed to halt bias and self-interest, only then to find himself subject to a “compulsory arbitration” he never agreed to, run by lawyers already found to be conflicted themselves, in front of an advocate he had zero say in appointing.
Moshabela’s lawyers have called it “arbitration by ambush”. At UCT, the tension lies in another question. What is really at play?
Moshabela faced 34 complaints from staff, channelled through UCT’s Ombud from 2025 onwards, ranging from alleged abuse of power to disputed performance reviews. Council appointed two senior advocates to investigate. They dismissed all complaints.
On May 30, 2026, on the strength of their report advising that no action be taken against Moshabela, Council resolved that no disciplinary proceedings be instituted. Council, inexplicably, so far, nonetheless sanctioned Moshabela by ordering him into, among others, executive coaching and a “360-degree reappraisal”.
It has also kept the independent investigators’ report from him ever since.
On August 5, Moshabela asked the Western Cape High Court to review and set aside Council’s decisions. The case has yet to be heard. Council has wisely suspended the sanctions taken against Moshabela pending the review.
What UCT’s Council has been doing since is the subject of this piece.
UCT Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse SC is a respondent in that review, with his own attorneys. Yet as Chair he would preside when Council decides how to respond to it, including what goes into the court record.
Moshabela and his legal team see that as a glaring conflict of interest. As do I, and so, I would wager, would most ordinary mortals. Even Council’s own attorneys conceded in writing that its decisions “may be vulnerable to being declared a nullity” if Arendse chairs the meeting.
South Africa’s Higher Education Act allows “any person” to notify a university Council Chair, in writing, of a member’s possible conflict of interest. A conflicted member must then recuse himself.
Court papers reveal that the VC gave three such notifications concerning Arendse.
Arendse has denied any conflict.
In September, UCT’s own attorneys twice proposed a binding determination of whether or not Arendse was obliged to recuse himself, requiring the VC’s agreement. He declined to agree.
What Council could not get by consent, it simply took without it, according to sources close to the case.
Fairbridges Attorneys invoked a deadlock mechanism, with managing director Adela Petersen apparently signing every letter and the brief to the Arbitrator.
In April 2026, when Moshabela’s legal team questioned her role in the investigation, Fairbridges claimed no “legally cognisable basis for impugning Ms Petersen’s involvement”.
By August 16, on UCT Interim Registrar’s own account, Petersen and Council’s senior advocate had told Council they would not represent it in the litigation “given their involvement in the investigation” into the VC.
By October, Petersen was back running the process, deciding who presides.
Sources say that at 18:06 on Friday, October 9, Petersen wrote that the parties must agree on an arbitrator by noon on Monday or have one appointed for them. This gave the VC’s legal team half a court day to respond.
Why does this matter? Because he raised Arendse’s conflict of interest some six weeks beforehand.
On Monday, October 12, the VC’s attorneys asked who was “bound” and on what basis. On Tuesday, Fairbridges declined “to engage with each of the questions”, wrote that the mechanism “does not depend on your client’s consent”, and in the next breath “invited” the VC to participate.
An invitation that’s impossible to decline is just a summons with better legal manners.
The arbitrator, Fairbridges added, would identify the issues.
Within two hours, sources say, Fairbridges had briefed Adv Nazreen Bawa SC. The brief identified the issues, styled the VC as the “Applicant” in a proceeding he had refused, and requested a decision “by midday on Friday, October 16, 2026 at the latest”.
The VC claims that Petersen’s brief omitted relevant documents that the Arbitrator needed to be fair. She left out, for example, the letter in which Council’s own attorneys conceded that its decisions “may be vulnerable to being declared a nullity” if Arendse chairs the Council meeting.
The arbitrator’s part
On Thursday, October 15, Moshabela’s attorneys declined, in an open letter, to participate and offered a simple way out. Arendse could step aside from chairing one item at the upcoming special council meeting, as he had on October 8.
The process did not pause.
Bawa dispensed with the oral hearing, considered only the documents Petersen had put in front of her, and, on Friday, found no conflicts of interest for Arendse to remain as Chair.
The award reached the parties as a Word document, last saved by Bawa at 14:31. A signed PDF, created at 15:41, followed, according to a source. Nobody furnishing the PDF version pointed out that the two differed. They differed, very much.
In the version first delivered, the VC’s complaints did not “constitute an indication of a conflict of interest”. In the signed version, they do not “constitute a real conflict of interest”.
The Act does not ask whether a conflict is real. It asks whether there is “a conflict or possible conflict of interest”.
The award was rewritten on precisely that point after it was sent to the parties, inexplicably without any explanation for this change. Both versions record that Bawa was “appointed on 13 October, 2026 by Fairbridges Attorneys”, on the strength of the Chair’s agreement “that I could make such decision”.
The VC’s refusal has clearly counted for nothing.
Let’s weigh this all up.
The arbitrator was chosen by one side. The instruction, the issues, the deadline and the documents all came from one side. UCT paid for the Arbitrator, “in substance”, as Moshabela’s attorneys put it.
UCT was effectively “arbitrating with itself”.
What is really at play?
But back, then, to the cemetery.
A grave is where you bury something. But exactly what has UCT buried here?
Firstly, as court papers show, the report by investigators that Council itself appointed, and has held since May 29, 2026, and has never been shown to the VC.
On the back of this report, Council resolved on May 30 that no disciplinary proceedings be instituted on any complaint. On all the complaints, the VC was comprehensively exonerated.
Secondly, the “concerns” on which Council nonetheless acted against the VC that have never been disclosed. Details of the “Forest Hill incident” were comprehensively ventilated in the affidavit of the academic involved.
And finally, at the deepest level, the true origin of and motive for the Ombud’s complaints.
Where did the complaints derive from? How many were fabricated? How many were in the name of individuals who did not consent to or know of their names being used, among them Wilna Venter and Prof Jeff Murugan?
How many were in the names of individuals who do not exist, as mentioned in the letter to the Interim Registrar from seven Council members who personally saw the report?
And, crucially, why? Why would the complaints from the Ombud’s office be fabricated? And on whose direction?
In March 2026, Council directed its investigators also “to investigate and report on the conduct of the Ombud”, Nashira Abrahams.
In a Radio 702 interview, Arendse declared that there was “absolutely no finding” of fabrication.
Perhaps what lies deepest in the grave is not the investigators’ report, but what it says about the Ombud’s role, and why Council has yet to appoint an independent investigation into Abrahams’s conduct.
If so, pertinent to note is who stands at the graveside.
UCT’s Chair, who has already taken a public position on that very question, stands there. Around him stand UCT’s teams of lawyers, shovels in hand, paid by the hour, working to a timetable that would put him in the chair when Council decides what the court and the public may see.
Who pays?
Count the lawyers.
Hayes Incorporated for UCT, Council and the Council Chair in the review; Kudo Law for UCT’s Interim Registrar in the review and Fairbridges for the Interim Registrar on the Chair’s recusal; Herold Gie for the Chair. The Ombud has her own external legal team, which UCT pays for.
Behind them stand senior advocates in the investigation itself, in the review, in the mechanism’s design and in the arbitrator’s chair. That comes with a hefty bill of its own.
Senior counsel’s time costs anywhere upwards of R40,000 a day.
Save perhaps for the Chairperson’s attorneys, those fees come from a public purse funded by the state (taxpayers’ money), students and donors.
All money could have been spared or directed to other needs within UCT.
Meanwhile, the review record, due on August 28, remains outstanding. No one outside of Council and their multiple legal practitioners knows what is in the investigators’ report.
On Friday, October 16, through UCT’s own communications department, the Chair welcomed the arbitrator’s award, then announced that, “despite this finding”, he would step aside from Sunday’s item after all.
“The interests of the university must come first,” Arendse said.
Stepping aside, the statement explained, “removes any suggestion that the litigation, or Council’s handling of it, could be delayed or called into question because of his participation”.
That is the VC’s case, in the Chair’s own words, and the very course the VC had proposed in writing the day before, free of charge, and available all along.
By the time Arendse offered his recusal as a very public “gesture”, the senior advocate’s bill had been run up. UCT will never have to disclose that figure. In fact, in the 2025 AFS, legal costs is not a separate expense line item. It is bundled in Consultant Fees.
No transparency. No accountability. Just spending.
When a university’s governing body reaches for costly lawyers before the simplest solution, one may fairly ask whether the legal process is resolving a dispute or being weaponised to wear a VC down and get him to wander off into the academic sunset.
The final reel
It is perhaps fitting that this academic Wild West’s final reel will be shot in the Western Cape High Court, and that the plot outline is plain.
On one side is a university VC who asks the Court to decide if the Council decisions against him were taken fairly and requests to see the record on which those decisions were based.
On the other, a Council led by a Chair and legal team comfortable with an arbitration process built in a week, framed without the person raising the issue to be arbitrated on, decided without him and without reference to his documents, the award quietly rewritten after the fact, and then the whole arbitration disregarded in any event by the Chair agreeing to recusal anyway.
There’s an old Hollywood cliché that “in the Old West, lawmen and outlaws were often just two sides of the same coin”.
When the power battle currently raging at UCT ends up in court, it will distinguish between the two and prove another old Hollywood Western cliché – that “this town ain’t big enough for both of them”.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/22867721059]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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