How interesting it was - given the View From the North's deep interest in the doings and screwings dontings of the NRF (aka the Not Real Funding Agency) - to see a circular from Prof Danie Visser this am, to "The Research Community at UCT".

This addresses, inter alia, the "...major policy-shift ...by announcing that henceforth rating and funding would once again be linked..."; the fact that "...the Treasury allocation was much lower than anticipated, which meant that many rated researchers were left in the lurch"; the funding disjunction between lurching into their new direction and fulfilling old obligations - and the problems with the online system. 

Anyone who was party to the old FRD / NRF Talk Usenet group will remember some serious raving about what an unadulterated crock of s**t the old system was - but how the newer one(s) were very little better.  I note that, while the NRF archive some of the NRF Talk postings, these are not among them....A pity, that: Retroid remembers having much fun broadcasting problems with the systems to all and sundry - one of which has ended up here. 

But we digress: while we commend Prof Visser on telling Dr. Albert S. van Jaarsveld (Acting President) UCT's frustrations with the Not Real Funding Agency, the problem is in fact SA-global.  That is, the agency is sick, underfunded, and under-competent.  Indeed, in the newest issue of the venerable South African Journal of Science - it's apron strings to the NRF now throughly severed - the new Editor, Michael Cherry, and two correspondents lay into the NRF in fine style.  And I can't link to it, because - despite being a member of the ASSAf and receiving free print copies, I cannot get the online version...!!

But the fundamental thing that is said is this:

"New researchers, rated for the first time, and more established ones-whose cycles are beginning, but who do not fall into the rating categories above-are left high and dry, unless they are successful in being allocated funds from the Blues Skies programme, which has only R7 million to disburse this year.

...Is it surprising that government appears to be denying the NRF additional funding, as it has shown that it is incapable of administering the funds it already has in a judicious manner?  The problem is that South Africa's research enterprise will be diminished, not just in terms of graduate students not trained, but as researchers who are denied funding opportunities - particularly young researchers, who are worst affected by the NRF's ill-conceived strategy - join the exodus to greener pastures abroad.

The NRF board, now chaired by Belinda Bozzoli of the University of the Witwatersand, should waste no more time appointing a new president, as the organisation appears to have been in limbo since the departure of its former president Khotso Mokhele in 2006. The incumbent needs to appoint a management team mative enough to look beyond the tired practices of the past in seeking a new modus operandi for funding research in South Africa."

Amen, brother Mike, amen....