Page 111 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

had begun to tackle had been mitigated, if not wholly removed. His slashing of the
personnel in its administrative division had cut its share of the MRC’s salary bill from
25 per cent in 2013 to 16 per cent in 2020, the disparity between funding intra- and
extramural research units had been redressed, with the former receiving 40 per cent
of the MRC’s research funding in 2013 compared with 82 per cent a year earlier, and
the protracted dispute with unionized staff, including court action, over a reluctance
to backdate adequately the payment of bonuses and salary increases had finally been
resolved, though not without the MRC having to pay out R32.3 million in back pay
and a trail of bad blood left on both sides. An employee perception survey in 2015
found that these delays in back payments were the ‘main source of dissatisfaction’
among staff. Reflecting this ongoing bitterness, one employee complained that
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‘the goal posts for payment [of bonuses] moved on a year rate … One feels that you
have to grovel and beg for a bonus payment … The bonus is begrudgingly given and
untimeously so’, while another expressed anger at ‘decisions made at times on our
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behalf without consultation of the masses’.
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It was partly to reduce such ill-feeling, to improve what one staff member described
as the ‘extremely poor’ communications between the MRC and its employees, and to
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overcome its perceived lack of transparency that in 2014 Gray persuaded her Board to
put out a regular communiqué to inform staff of the key matters it was discussing and
the Executive Management Committee to follow suit soon afterwards so as ‘to improve
transparency and instil trust in the management’.
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These measures, along with increasing funding from both government and foreign
sources as a result of strategic lobbying, helped dilute the hostility which had greeted
Gray at first. In part this was personal to her – two staff petitions to the Board spoke
of her unsuitability for the post because she was said to lack appropriate administrative
experience; in part this was because she was assumed to be continuing the MRC’s
programme of revitalization when she suspended two senior executives in her first two
years in the job. Still smarting from Karim’s radical surgery, some staff ‘were hostile
to me and to the institution’, she recalled. ‘They were very angry … [and] I felt like
a Genghis Khan.’ However, her enthusiasm and realization that she needed to curb
her tendency to shoot from the hip and consult others first began slowly to turn such
attitudes around, especially as she also revised pay scales and showed herself keen to
promote new lines of research and increase competitive grants to fund this. ‘We were
just handing out cash to all the scientists, which is beautiful’, she enthused about the
extra funding available for project proposals judged to be of international standard, as
it helped fuel ‘a renaissance of science’.
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