Marika Sboros writes that UCT gave retirees less than two business days’ notice before announcing plans to cut their medical-aid subsidies by 35%, affecting around 1,800 people (1200 retirees plus their spouses and dependents). The move directly contradicts Council Chair Norman Arendse’s public claims that UCT remains financially healthy despite donor losses linked to its 2024 Gaza resolutions. UCT’s HR head confirmed the cut is part of a “wider financial squeeze,” while Arendse’s cited R1.35-billion surplus is mostly restricted funds he can’t touch — stripped out, UCT ran a R320.96-million deficit in 2025. Sboros also disputes claims made by Arendse and faculty member Shuaib Manjra around rankings, donor figures and the scale of student hardship.
By Marika Sboros
The University of Cape Town (UCT) has informed retirees – without any prior consultation – that it intends cutting their medical-aid subsidies across the board by 35%.
Yet UCT Council Chair Adv Norman Arendse, SC, wants the public to believe the university is thriving financially despite the donor-fund haemorrhage after adoption of the “Gaza Resolutions” in June 2024.
Call me cynical, but a financially healthy institution does not suddenly announce a cut of more than a third to slash retirees’ medical cover, without significant stakeholder engagement.
Dr Shuaib Manjra, a medical doctor, member of UCT’s medical faculty and a “human rights activist”, echoes Arendse’s claim and says UCT is resistant to “clickbait outrage” over the resolutions.
But then, both don’t always get their facts straight.
In a recent News24 opinion piece, Manjra claims that UCT’s global rankings have risen since the donor losses. Not according to the latest Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR). UCT has lost its Number One spot in Africa to arch-rival Wits University for the first time in years. It has dropped from 275th to 276th in the world, while Wits is at 200th.
UCT first told retirees about the planned cut at a Zoom meeting on Monday, July 13, 2026, at 10am, after an emailed invitation on Thursday afternoon, July 13, headed “Post-Retirement Medical Aid Discussion”. That gave them less than two business days’ notice to attend a meeting timed when some of the 1,800 affected (1,200 main members, plus spouses and dependants) would be asleep on the other side of the world.
Only 188 attended, limiting numbers and stakeholder engagement.
‘Unconscionable’ behaviour by UCT
UCT’s Human Resources Executive Director Juliet Mhango ran the Zoom meeting and pitched it as an “engagement”. Those present saw it as an announcement of a fait accompli. They called it “unconscionable”, “manifestly, procedurally unfair” and likely “not legal”.
They could not even get a straight answer as to who is behind it.
Mhango said it was the work of “the Executive” but that means Vice-Chancellor (VC) Prof Mosa Moshabela and his management committee. Not UCT’s chief financial officer, registrar and committees actually driving it.
She confirmed the cut as part of a “wider financial squeeze”, directly contradicting Arendse’s public protestations that there isn’t one.
She said that UCT had taken legal advice but declined to name the law firm or share the advice.
That fits with the PR drive Arendse and Manjra appear to be on, to change the narrative around donor losses and the resolutions.
That drive looks more like damage control. It follows a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Higher Education (PPCHE) hearing in June. MPs’ alarm at the scale of donor losses was apparent, despite the numbers being on public record since January 2025 in the “Mendelsohn matter” lawsuit.
UCT historical studies professor Adam Mendelsohn launched the lawsuit in August 2024 in the Western Cape High Court, arguing that the resolutions were adopted unlawfully, are irrational, and threaten academic freedom. The hearing was held in October 2025. The ruling has been delayed and is expected later this year.
Arendse’s answers to the PPCHE were illuminating in ways he may not have intended.
Filling yawning gaps on donor losses
He understated the donor losses and their effect on UCT’s finances, staff, students and global reputation, leaving Moshabela to fill the yawning gaps.
Moshabela disclosed a loss of approximately R250-million in donor funding, including the Donald Gordon Foundation’s (DGF) R200-million pledge to UCT’s Neuroscience Institute.
The balance comprised R50 million from other philanthropic sources and alumni, including a R15-million-a-year loss in recurring student support, after the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation withdrew its annual R6.75 million grant for disadvantaged students in May 2024.
The Harry Crossley Foundation later withdrew its R9.375 million annual student bursary and research grant from 2025 onward, citing cancel culture and antisemitism on campus.
Moshabela’s report did not include the lost-opportunity cost of the DGF’s separate withdrawal of R400–500 million for a private teaching hospital. That project has gone to Stellenbosch University.
As a member of UCT’s medical faculty, Manjra will be keenly aware of the implications. His very own future students at UCT will miss out on a training hospital. And one of his daughters is studying medicine at Stellenbosch, not his alma mater.
UCT is still suffering the tsunami of US funding cuts hitting South Africa hard in early 2025. It has reportedly received more National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants than any other South African tertiary institution – 155, against 110 for Wits.
By May 2025, UCT was disclosing the shape of that damage in its own numbers. Of 178 US federally funded awards, 22 NIH sub-awards worth R172-million were already hit with stop-work orders; a further 93 projects worth R265-million sit without renewal notices.
If those 93 died, UCT stood to lose R437-million within the year, and R1.67-billion over two years. That’s its own accounting, and the trajectory since has only worsened.
Direct NIH grants to South Africa fell from $44-million across 102 awards in 2024, to $34-million across 73 in 2025, to just $5.9-million across seven by April 2026 – a collapse of more than 85% in under two years. South Africa is now reportedly the only country formally excluded from NIH health-research funding and the US Division of AIDS Research (DAIDS) networks, putting up to $450-million a year at risk nationally.
Despite severe, and almost uncertain, disruptions to UCT’s own lifesaving HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis trials – given its standing as one of the country’s leading centres for research – Arendse and Manjra have consistently downplayed the crises precipitated by US funding cuts.
The same fault line – SA’s stance on Israel and Gaza
Arendse and Manjra are correct in saying the cuts are not a direct result of the Gaza resolutions. Trump’s February 2025 executive order gave its own reasons – South Africa’s Expropriation Act, its Iran ties, and Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. Washington was punishing a country, not a university, and said so in writing.
But they don’t get to call the two massive groups of funding losses entirely unrelated just because Washington gave different reasons. Both trace back to the same fault line – South Africa’s stance on Israel and Gaza.
The pattern gets harder to explain away. While UCT’s Council Chair was telling Parliament about its healthy balance sheet, UCT was preparing to tell retirees of bloody cuts to medical-aid subsidies.
Arendse has cited UCT’s R1.35-billion surplus as proof of financial stability. That figure is real – and flattering. Taken from the university’s unaudited 2025 annual financial statement, most of it comes from restricted research grants and donor funds tied by law to specific projects.
It’s money that UCT cannot touch to pay for something essential for their retirees’ survival – their medical-aid subsidies.
Strip that out, and the day-to-day funds UCT is actually free to spend – on salaries, benefits, things it chooses how to fund – ran a deficit of R320.96 million in 2025. That’s improvement on the R434.66 million deficit the year before, but still a deficit, two years running.
Arendse has also cited a Mastercard Foundation donation worth around R1-billion over time, as proof that the donor haemorrhage was a minor trickle. He has carefully avoided saying it was new money. That’s a smart move as it’s not new money.
Faltering claims
The Foundation’s partnership with UCT has run since 2014.
He has called it the “largest-ever single donation” to UCT, and proof of “sustained donor confidence”. That claim doesn’t hold up either. UCT’s slide presentation to the PPCHE called a US$21.5-million donation from Atlantic Philanthropies its “single largest donation ever”.
Manjra has been even more profligate with numbers.
On Salaam Media on 22 July, he told listeners that “Mastercard funds UCT to the tune of probably about a billion rand a year”. He was likely off by an order of magnitude.
In May 2025, Arendse complained in a News24 article that criticism of the resolutions was “misleading and hyperbolic”. He might have a word in Manjra’s ear about his misleading, hyperbolic statements.
Both cite UCT’s unaudited annual financial statements as proof that it has weathered the resolutions and donor confidence is solid. Those statements show something else. Annually, actuaries estimate the eventual cost of UCT’s retiree medical-aid promise, based on life expectancy and medical inflation.
In 2025, that estimate jumped by R48-million, against a R6.2-million rise in 2024. That’s an eightfold jump but not cash UCT that paid out. It’s a revaluation of a long-term promise, a number that should have surprised no one at UCT, whatever else Council was up to.
It is proof that the cost of that promise was already climbing before UCT chose to cut retirees’ medical-aid subsidies by 35%. If anything, it shows that UCT announced a large, specific numbered cut without stakeholder engagement.
That’s a habit UCT has developed recently, as the resolutions show.
Arendse and Manjra both effectively like to use macro-level operational surpluses to mask deep, micro-level localised devastation. They can point to all the surpluses they like. Neither can explain why an institution absorbing a donor exodus and a US funding freeze worth billions found the money by quietly cutting medical-aid lifelines for those least able to fight back.
The PPCHE meeting revived questions about effects of donor losses on UCT’s disadvantaged students – another area both downplayed. Moshabela told the committee the toll was real and heavy; DA MP Karabo Khakhau pressed Arendse directly on it.
She said that no political stance, however principled, should stand between a student and UCT’s mandate to educate, and Council should have weighed that fully before voting.
She got that right.
Impact on UCT students
Arendse, predictably, did not respond. Instead, he talked about governance, and said that Council had acted in UCT’s “best interests”. That sits awkwardly with sworn court papers in Mendelsohn’s case – the original public source for several funding-loss figures Arendse now plays down publicly.
He and Manjra also understate the effects of the resolutions on UCT’s disadvantaged students. The UCT student I interviewed for this article does not.
He is a Black African second-year student from a privileged background who has seen firsthand what his fellow students go through. He says that poor UCT students were under severe strain long before the resolutions. Many are now so deep in debt with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) – due to the scheme’s own chronic dysfunction as much as donor withdrawal – that they cannot register for the following year or graduate.
What’s new is the degree to which the resolutions’ donor losses have impacted students. He has seen classmates sleeping in the Steve Biko Students’ Union building and asking friends in residence to sign them in as guests at the dining hall, just so they can have a meal.
“The people paying for this,” the student told me, “are never the ones who voted for it.”
He is correct.
Disadvantaged students lose bursaries when donors withdraw, and mentorship when a leadership programme stops taking new intakes. That’s not because donors tried to “buy obedience,” as South African “broadcaster”, Redi Thlabi, who now works for Al Jazeera, posted on X recently. Or “financial coercion”, as Arendse puts it.
It’s because some Council members chose a symbolic vote over a signed contract and clause that UCT itself had drafted and signed, without telling colleagues left to explain the shortfall.
Manjra’s own account to Salaam Media, is telling. He describes the DGF’s contractual requirement that UCT abide by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as an attempt to dictate to UCT what it should do, which goes against “the spirit of institutional autonomy”. He called UCT Council’s stance a fight against “bullying by funders… by Zionists around the world, by liberals.”
Manjra has a habit of describing fellow South Africans in ways that would end most public careers.
Confronted with supporters at Mendelsohn’s inaugural lecture, who included Black South Africans standing with Israel, he erased them, referring to “whites inside the room; blacks outside” and a “rent-a-crowd of black people.”
He demonstrates particular animus towards Jews, calling them “a group of messianic lunatics, addicted to killing and destroying.” He told a Jewish critic to “look up Khazaria” – a piece of pseudo-history built to deny Jewish origins in the Middle East.
Pulling the race card – again!
Ahead of a UCT Convocation Council election in April 2024, he called four candidates a “fear-mongering, white-supremacist zionist [sic] slate”.
Pulling the race card is a predictable default position when all rational argument fails.
Pull these threads together, strip away the noise about Israel and Gaza, and what’s left are straightforward claims from Mendelsohn’s court papers. Council railroaded the resolutions with a marked lack of democratic transparency and stakeholder engagement. Resulting losses have been devastating for UCT and its most vulnerable students.
UCT should not be surprised if its lazy stakeholder “engagement” with retirees is read the same way.
It cannot claim the moral high ground internationally while its own Council has engineered a self-inflicted financial hole at home and expects its most vulnerable retirees to pay for it.
Pleading poverty in one venue and stability in another is not sound stewardship. It is the efforts of university on its financial, ethical knees, dressed up as a “managed transition”.
*UCT has invited retirees to a follow-up Zoom meeting on August 6, 2026.
Communications head Elijah Moholola responded via email on the planned 35% cut to retirees’ medical-aid.
He refused to divulge which law firm was advising UCT. He said it was “currently consulting with relevant stakeholders, including retirees and recognised unions, on proposed amendments to its post-retirement medical aid benefits, as part of a broader financial sustainability plan aimed at ensuring the university’s long-term sustainability”.
This was “an internal consultation process involving confidential discussions and proposals that have not yet been finalised”. Therefore, further comment was not appropriate.
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