Page 99 - 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

president when Mbewu suddenly resigned in 2009.
Out of his depth and very aware that he had been appointed as a short-term stopgap
– he was ‘very risk averse, he didn’t want to rock the boat’, judged a senior MRC
177
staffer’ – the 57-year-old Dhansay tried in vain to stay out of the battles both within
the Board and between it, the Executive Management Committee, intra- and extramural
178
directors, and senior administrators. ‘I had to manage all sides’, he lamented.
Recognizing the weakness of his position, some of them bypassed him, fuelling
infighting further. With the Board and its chair, his relations became ‘acrimonious and
prickly as they did a lot of micro-management’, he regretted. An insider spoke of ‘a
179
state of war’ prevailing between Dhansay and the Board. No wonder that a senior
180
scientific administrator with an insider’s knowledge of the MRC concluded, in the
face of this managerial and administrative turbulence, that Dhansay was ‘weak and not
181
up to the job’. Finding a way out of this disarray required a far more forceful hand
than Dhansay was able to wield. He was ‘not a cut-throat’, explained a sympathetic but
tough-minded unit director. ‘Ali could not fight dirty.’ Consequently, a rudderless
182
MRC drifted even further.
In fact, noticeable drifting had already begun under Dhansay’s predecessor, the
45-year-old Tony Mbewu, although he could not claim this was the result of his
unfamiliarity with the inner workings of the MRC, as he had been its director of
research since 1996. His appointment to this position was paradoxical, however,
because, though a London-trained cardiologist, he was not engaged in research himself.
Perhaps as a consequence, feeling himself not in tune with the ethos or methodology of
research per se, he concentrated on the work of the Research Translation Office, which
he established, coining the short-lived mnemonic GRIPPP (‘Get Research Results into
Policy, Practice, Products and Health Promotion’) when he did so. ‘Research makes
no difference unless it is translated into policy, practice, promotion and products’, he
proclaimed confidently. Yet the financial returns on GRIPPP and commercialization
183
were not forthcoming, which added to the MRC’s deepening financial strain, further
estranging him from the MRC. He ‘could not make decisions’, complained one unit
director. ‘It is not good … to create a policy on the spur of the moment because there
is an [urgent] issue. That is not how an institution runs.’ Increasingly he spent time
184
away from the MRC, shunning difficult decisions, fudging them or leaving them to
others to make. ‘It seems that there is a symptom in the MRC that management does
not want to deal with issues’, complained one of the Board’s committees, while in
185
2007 the Executive Management Committee described the previous three years as ‘a
time of turmoil’ as the MRC coasted along in a laissez-faire manner. Unit directors
186
complained that the MRC’s management ‘has been in limbo’ and so unable to lobby

92