April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

Denel’s June 2009 official newsletter, Insights, bragged, “As a result of the
display of our infantry weapons, like 40mm AGL, NTW-20 anti-materiel
rifle, SS77 and Mini SS machineguns, as well as artillery capability,
missiles, aircraft maintenance and mine action services, Denel is already
negotiating contracts in Libya.”
Dust storms ordinarily make it difficult to target protesters scurrying to
safety, so Gaddafi’s army will happily deploy Denel’s Rooivalk attack
helicopters, alongside other regional dictators disturbed by the dangerous
democrats. For as Denel Aviation CE Ismail Dockrat told DefenseWeb.co.za
just before his 2009 sales trip to Tripoli, “We have identified North Africa
and the Middle East as key markets in which Denel Aviation can leverage
its brand.”
So too did singers Mariah Carey, Beyonce Knowles and Nelly Furtado
leverage their brands for millions of dollars of Gaddafi oil money, resulting
in irretrievable brand contamination once WikiLeaks revealed their deeds
last month.
And in Sandton, the five-star Michaelangelo and Radisson Blu hotels are
partially owned by the Libyan Investment Authority, an agency set up in
2006 by Saif. According to brand-conscious Michealangelo manager Bart
Dorrestein, the Libyan connection was “hugely damaging to our
organisation and the morale in our company.”
The same is true for the Libyan School of Economics, formerly known as
the London School of Economics, now the truth is out about Saif’s
purchased, plagiarized, ghost-written, and obviously unsupervised,
unexamined doctoral thesis. The plagiarized material, according to Robert
Sparling of McGill Universty, “seems to be giving unwarranted comfort
since it makes the LSE appear to be the victim of a fraud, rather than
accomplice to moral corruption.”
Many institutions are guilty of selling favours to the rich and powerful, or
in the case of my own institution, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, of
being conveniently asleep at the academic wheel. Recall that in 2003, our
Mechanical Engineering Department awarded a doctorate to SA’s top arms
dealer, Chippy Shaik, who was responsible for the R65 billion Arms Deal
procurement and hence a great deal of the country’s political rot,
including a R21 million bribe to the Shaik family from German firm
Thyssen, revealed last September.
After allegations that Shaik’s PhD was “fraudulent and littered with errors,
including incorrect formulations and poor spelling and referencing” –
according to the Mail & Guardian, which with the help of disgruntled arms
dealer Richard Young, broke the story – the doctoral degree was revoked in
2008 because it was “substantially plagiarized.”
The LSE’s ethical collapse occurred in part through a £2.2m contract to
train Gaddafi’s civil servants, and also within its Center for the Study of
Global Governance, which in July 2009 was granted £1.5 million by Saif’s
Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation (GICDF).
Coincidentally, Centre director David Held sat on the GICDF board in June
2009, and soon thereafter remarked, “I’ve come to know Saif as someone
who looks to democracy, civil society and deep liberal values as the core
of his inspiration.”
“Held has a history of ignoring academic standards in order to come close
to people in power,” according to Erik Ringmar, who is now based