Page 96 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

Positively into the New South Africa: The MRC, 1995–2012

The director of one extramural unit was so disheartened by the bureaucratic demands
made on him by the Administration Department that he terminated his unit after
just three years. ‘The research was not worth [all] the administration’, he admitted
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frankly, especially as the original grant to his unit was ‘downright miserly’. Indeed,
outside the MRC, word of mouth had it that ‘grants were pitifully small and not worth
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the considerable time and effort involved in applying for, and reporting on’. For
some extramural researchers, the prestige of heading an MRC-supported unit was
increasingly insufficient to attract them to apply for its support.
Furthermore, as the MRC tightened its belt, staff ire rose over the suspension of
the payment of performance bonuses in 2009 – there was even talk of joining a trade
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union to challenge this – while the long-standing competition for funds between
intra- and extramural research units intensified, with some of the latter feeling that
they were being made to pay for the former being spared severe cuts. They argued that
the original, even-handed funding model for units had become seriously distorted in
favour of the former on the grounds that these focused mainly on the country’s biggest
killers and on monitoring them closely. Any attempt to change this balance produced
‘some tension’, admitted the head of the Research Division. The Dean of one
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medical school claimed that, even before the MRC’s financial crunch, its intramural
research units ‘took a disproportionate amount of the MRC funds to the detriment of
the universities’, even though the latter could produce scholarly articles for 20 per
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cent of what it cost intramural MRC units to do so, in part because of their ready access
to postgraduate researchers. As a result, year after year, senior scientists in extramural
research units turned out more publications than did their peers in intramural units.
To sharpen this rivalry even more, some extramural researchers pointed out that there
was costly duplication among what one MRC president called the ‘mollycoddled’
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intramural units and that several were outdated and ‘past their sell-by-date’. 162
In these circumstances, disillusionment and apathy among the staff grew, while
their morale and confidence in the MRC’s management fell. ‘The word on the street at
the MRC is survival’, admitted one unit director. ‘People are doing the bare minimum
to get by; the problems within the organisation having decreased the level of drive
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and determination of staff.’ Vexed, a member of staff lamented that ‘mediocrity
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is [now] the accepted standard’. Alienation and indignation were rife. ‘Expecting
staff to do World-Class research while paying them median-class salaries’ was quite
unacceptable, argued one indignantly.
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Deepening the gloom among staff were the escalating divisions within the Council’s
governance structure as the president, the Board, the Executive Management corps
and unit directors each sought to address the multi-sided financial problems in

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