Page 63 - 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

of MRC scholarships and bursaries were reserved for graduates of South Africa’s
historically black universities, and new posts for up-and-coming black and female
researchers were created in terms of the Research Capacity Development Programme.
All of this would mark ‘a radical change in the MRC’s basic formula for allocation of
research funds’, the MRC announced proudly.
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Allied with this transformation of the MRC’s research staff went Makgoba’s
commitment to transform what they researched too. In this, community-oriented
research in the broad area of public health rather than purely curiosity-driven or blue-
sky research was to be given priority, rather at odds with the view then held by many
MRC scientists that if research ‘wasn’t in the New England Journal of Medicine, it
wasn’t real science’. Henceforth, research had to be ‘compatible with our nation’s
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burden of disease and socio-economic imperatives’, Makgoba proclaimed, and ‘needed
to address African health realities, those major health challenges that have the greatest
socio-economic and developmental impact’.
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To flesh out this broad general goal and attain it, special committees, workshops
and bosberade proliferated in these years, yielding a plethora of vision statements and
implementation, strategic, corporate and business plans, often couched in jargon-rich
texts laced with what a historian of a similar medical research institution has called ‘a
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jungle of acronyms’. ‘We are literally drowning in a pool of newly coined buzzwords’,
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admitted one flabbergasted MRC veteran: ‘transitions, transparency, empowerment,
transformations, visionary leadership and transformational leadership. It is at times
very difficult to make sense of an environment characterised by discontinuous
change.’ For their part, basic scientists were reported to be feeling ‘considerable
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uncertainty … about their future in the new scenario’. 19
Alongside this flow of words and the removal in 1993 of racially based – and, slightly
later, gender-based – differences in pensions and housing subsidies, a start was also
made with transforming the racial and gender composition of the scientific, technical
and administrative staff, a process in which the Government felt the MRC should
set an example to other parastatals. Quite simply, ‘We expect it to contribute to the
deracialisation of our society and the building of a humane people-centred society’,
declared Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Pressured in this way by
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its baseline funder to go beyond words, what Makgoba called the MRC’s ‘aggressive
transformation process’ saw the percentage of blacks on the staff rise from 41 per
21
cent in 1994 to 59 per cent in 2009, while the percentage of women employees soared
from under 20 per cent to 66 per cent.
22
Yet retaining these new black members of staff was often a problem as many
were already older than their twenty-something colleagues and thus had family

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