Unisa is heading to the Constitutional Court to defend its decision to drop Afrikaans from being guaranteed bilingual use with English at the country’s biggest higher education institution, says a Weekend Argus report. 

It is seeking to overturn the SCA judgment in May last year which set aside the new language policy approved in 2016 by its council and senate.

AfriForum unsuccessfully challenged the decision at the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria) in 2018, but the SCA ruled in the organisation’s favour, declaring the policy unconstitutional and unlawful for removing Afrikaans as a language of learning and tuition.

At the High Court, AfriForum also failed in its bid to interdict Unisa from implementing the new language policy and the university proceeded to the extent that by 2017 no modules were offered in Afrikaans at undergraduate level.

However, the SCA also ordered Unisa to notify its students about the list of modules and courses at all levels on offer in Afrikaans before the decision was taken in April 2016 and present them in full until the institution’s language policy has been lawfully amended.

In its Constitutional Court application, former Unisa vice-chancellor Professor Mandla Makhanya said the revised language policy included a range of measures to enhance the status of indigenous African languages.

‘It also revised the existing language policy to remove a guarantee of bilingual offerings of modules in English and Afrikaans in favour of a system where the language of teaching and learning at Unisa would be English,’ Makhanya said in his founding affidavit.

According to the Weekend Argus report, he said all official languages, including Afrikaans, were not simply discarded but that Unisa valued them on an equal basis.

In its response, AfriForum pointed out about 25 000 Afrikaans-speaking students’ choices of language were affected by the new language policy and around 100 000 study opportunities in Afrikaans modules destroyed.

Unisa has also complained to the Constitutional Court that it would not be feasible to implement the SCA order for the 2021 academic year.

But AfriForum is adamant that since Unisa’s application for leave to appeal will be heard on 20 May, if judgment were to be delivered early in the third term, the university would have sufficient time to ready itself to offer courses in Afrikaans from January next year.

‘It is not fair to the students currently studying at Unisa and prospective students to have to wait until January 2023 to again enjoy the constitutional right that Unisa has unlawfully denied them,’ AfriForum argued.

Full Weekend Argus report (subscription needed)