BAC, SRC festival war rages on
Katlego Isaacs | Sunday June 5, 2022 06:00
Monageng had taken to the media to publicly air his grievances with the school management over the decision to unexpectedly pull all funding for its Semester Shutdown Event on May 8. The festival left the SRC with a staggering P180,000 bill for the performers and service providers.
The college management deems Monageng's comments defamatory. A video, published by the Parrot News Online, featured the SRC President exposing the alleged corrupt practices and sabotage efforts by the university management against himself and even the previous SRC presidents. The video garnered over 3,200 views prompting a response by the BAC management in the form of a legal letter to Monageng ordering the video be taken down on all social media platforms and search engines with a publicly issued letter of apology to the university management for tarnishing the school’s image. Board secretary and legal counsel of BAC, Enelys Shamakumba has expressed in a letter that the allegations made in the video were inaccurate and failed to equitably indicate the faults made by Monageng during the planning and execution of the Semester Shutdown.
The letter indicates three points of contention with Monageng’s interview, being that he falsely accused the university of engaging in acts of administrative corruption, that the university harassed and threatened the education of the current SRC president and his two predecessors, and that the university purposely sabotaged the Semester Shutdown Event. “The import of the above statements in the mind of the ordinary listener watching and listening to the video is that BAC management is vindictive and has complete disregard for their own rules and procedures of good governance,” Shamakumba said in the letter. “The said video was published on the world wide web by a newspaper, which has wide circulation across the country and the world.
The video was without doubt calculated to create sensationalism and to defame the good name, character and image of BAC management and the institution they lead, and to lower their esteem in the minds of right-thinking individuals within the tertiary education system in Botswana, and indeed the world,” she continued. “The essence of the matter is that, as the President of the SRC, you failed and/or neglected to comply with clear guidelines and milestones leading up to the hosting of the event,” she accused.
As a sought relief, the school management offered Monageng seven days to issue a public apology and scrub the Internet of all published materials that defame the image of the school with evidence of doing so. According to the letter, failure to delete the video and issue a public apology would leave management with no choice but to seek legal action in court against Monageng for defamation against the school. Following the reception of the letter from management, Monageng published an open letter on social media the same day in shock that the school management would threaten him with a court order. “This letter [from management] comes right after I requested a report on the subvention funds that had been credited to the institution by the government of Botswana for the past years,” Monageng said in the letter. “During the day of the event, we were sabotaged by the management and when I say things of this nature, and the injustice that happens, it baffles to see an institution as big as this on generating over P200 million of income annually to take a 22-year-old boy to court is really fascinating,” he said.
Monageng also alleged that the university took his academic results and shared them to an open forum for the public to see, indicating that Monageng is a poor performing student and is likely to fail his course of study. The SRC president then went on to publish another open letter, which addressed all of the unanswered issues that the SRC has had with the school during his time as president arguing that the school management has always been unjust since well before the Semester Shutdown Event. The letter details that the school management went on a luxurious trip to Maun sponsored by the Botswana Tertiary Student Sport Association (BOTESSA) to build a school environment that nurtures sports yet purposely excluded the SRC from the trip and failed to register a single student to compete in inter-territory sports competitions. Monageng also said the school regularly fails to provide student accommodation to students that need it most, instead opting to provide accommodation at random using the example of a student that had been orphaned during her studies with nowhere to live to which management demanded several documents of proof from the student yet failed to provide her accommodation after she provided the requested documents.
The letter then went on to claim that if the university provided the subvention fund meant for the SRC annual budget that he had requested from the school, then the school would have green basketball courts, and student transportation. “Please don’t get my letter wrong and twisted here, I love this institution, its students and the lecturers but I urge management to sit down and address these matters instead of running after to get rid of me for speaking about things that will make this institution a better place,” Monageng stated. To date, the Parrot News Online has yet to delete the interview from its page and Monageng has expressed no interest in having them do so.