UCT RAG floats

As a UCT alumnus, I'm quite attached to the institution. As a first year student there are certain traditions one enters into. Firstly, you simply have to go and sell the RAG magazine. RAG is the student-run fundraising arm of SHAWCO, the student-run charity organisation. You get to dress up weirdly, stand at traffic lights and sell a magazine put together by students. All money raised goes to SHAWCO.

The other more exclusive event is the RAG float parade. This event is exclusively for students of the various hostels. Each hostel designs its own float. These are then paraded down one of the streets in the CBD, collecting money as they go. Again, all money raised goes to SHAWCO. One of the photo blogs I follow is Cape Town Daily Photo. They have a great photo album of this year's parade, which took place yesterday.

SHAWCO runs a variety of projects, both in the health and education sector. As a student, I got involved in one of the educational projects. At the time, I wasn't terribly impressed with their organisation (even back then I was not very tolerant of people who couldn't organise themselves properly), but I figured that at least I was doing SOMETHING.

This year, the RAG magazine event created a lot of controversy because of a comic strip that was very anti-Christianity. So much so that it has even been debated on national television and news. I wasn't surprised by it, as even when I was at university, the institution as a whole was very anti-Christianity, and over the years that I was there the magazine got more and more smutty in its content.

During a discussion in the staff room though, I learnt that one of my colleagues had (recently) been on SHAWCO's executive board. She resigned when she discovered how poorly run the organisation is. Being such a large organisation, they receive tons of funding from all over the world. This money is, apparently, not put to good use. It isn't mis-managed as such, just not utilised properly. For example, SHAWCO received a lump sum of several hundred thousand Rand to be used for one of their educational projects. Instead of buying equipment for underprivileged schools (even low tech stuff like stationery - many kids can't afford to buy paper or pens or textbooks), money was spent buying digital cameras and having T-shirts printed to be able to take photos of UCT students interacting with the kids at a few schools.

In addition, I was told that the RAG magazine, which bears UCT's logo and name, is not seen or approved by anyone in UCT's official management. SHAWCO operates entirely independently. To my mind, if you are a large organisation, such as UCT, and something carries your name and logo on it, you'd want to make sure that the quality of the that product meets a required standard, so that your name doesn't become associated with smut and discrimination based on religion. Apparently not though.

Hearing this, coupled with my own poor experience of SHAWCO when I was a student has put me off the organisation as a whole. As a result, I decided to boycott the parade. I've also decided to boycott the RAG magazine in future, and all things SHAWCO related. Pity, because when I make my millions, I might have given some to them.