Page 95 - 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

SAMRC had floundered.’ His successor, Professor Mike Sathekge, recalled with
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regret that the MRC was then ‘in a bad space to deliver on our mandate to the people
of South Africa’.
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In part, this curtailment of the Government’s annual baseline grant was the result
of the Department of Health’s lack of vigour in lobbying the Cabinet and the Treasury
for a bigger grant for the MRC. The Council had been ‘badly neglected’ and treated
as ‘a Cinderella’, opined the chair of the 2010 SETI Review. Consequently, it was
‘chronically underfunded’, as the National Department of Health was concentrating
on improving service delivery rather than promoting research. Its neglect of what
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a later report called ‘many of the necessary stewardship functions’ on behalf of the
MRC meant that the latter was ‘ill-served by its reporting line to the Department
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of Health’, concluded the SETI Review’s chair critically. Nor did the fact that at
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the same time the MRC remained responsible to the Department of Science and
Technology for the thrust of its research make the position any easier, for the two
departments were poor in co-ordinating their shared organizational oversight of the
MRC. This ‘has been a long-term challenge’, complained Sathekge as chair of the
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Board, ‘because our work falls between the two’.
Adding to this pressure on the MRC’s finances was the fact that its income from
marketing the fruits of its research fell far below what had been projected and that,
for all the inflow of funding from overseas sources for joint research programmes,
administering these large sums was quite costly in clerical and managerial time.
Consequently, from 2009 the Board laid down that administration costs had to be
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included in all contract research agreements ‘such that it ensures full cost recovery’.
On top of this, the MRC’s increasingly dire financial situation was exacerbated by
accumulating structural, governance and leadership problems too. A steadily growing
Administration Department was consuming 38 per cent of the MRC’s budget by 2012,
with spending on the Finance Department alone outstripping expenditure on AIDS
research three-and-a half times. Long-embedded chain management procedures were
‘stifling research’, observed a subsequent MRC president, Professor Salim Abdool
Karim. ‘Administration was the tail wagging the dog.’ Moreover, with salaries
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constituting 87 per cent of the budget for intramural units, the purchase of apparatus
and chemicals from abroad using South African rands had to be increasingly selective.
‘We employ people, but have no money to fund them to do research’, Karim concluded
despairingly. 155
Not that this relatively favourable treatment of the administrative arm yielded
good-quality financial management. Procedures were cumbersome and less than
efficient, leaving some unit directors feeling poorly supported and even alienated.

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