KwaZulu-Natal Regional Director, Joyce Myeza, received her Doctor of Philosophy on 18 May 2021 at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). She is a dedicated and inspirational scholar who received her BA degree at Unisa, a Postgraduate Diploma in Information Studies and her Honours degree in Information Sciences from UKZN, a master’s degree from the Durban University of Technology, another master’s degree from the Simmons College in Boston, US, and a leadership certificate from Harvard University.

All residents of KwaZulu-Natal will be very familiar with the sardine run, which usually takes place on the coast annually during June/July, and it is hailed a significant tourism event for the province. The title of Myeza’s master’s dissertation at DUT was The use of the sardine run as a marketing tool by indigenous business and its economic effect on the South Coast indigenous population. She also wrote a research paper about the socio-economic implications of the sardine run in KwaZulu-Natal for local indigenous communities.

Myeza’s doctoral thesis topic was User acceptance of systems for archiving and securing degree certificates and related documents. Her interest in this topic was due to the increase in cases of people found to have fake senior certificates or university degrees. She felt that this was a growing concern because it tainted the image and reputation of the higher education sector in South Africa and would place at risk the international relationships in higher education which South Africans have enjoyed for so many years.

She is also an accomplished author and has published several papers, including Information hiding with data diffusion using convolutional encoding for superencryption, with JM Blackledge, P Tobin, and CM Adolfo.

We spoke to Myeza to find out who this diversified, interesting, and phenomenal woman leading the Unisa-KwaZulu Natal region is. She said she has always been very curious by nature and is constantly interested in a topic she knows nothing about. Although she has other names as well, she uses the forename ‘Joyce’ most of the time. After completing her BA degree, she had full intentions of becoming a teacher because she wanted to help people. She taught for a short period but realised that she had a love and passion for books.

Myeza is one of those people you would not call a specialist in her field, but rather a Jill of all trades because of her various interests. The courses she did while she was in New York included one on the topic of information technology security architecture, and she discovered that it was an aspect she was very interested in.

One of her hobbies is understanding the process of investigating criminal cases, as she enjoys the challenge of establishing how criminal cases are resolved. She used to be a librarian, and she is interested in research and finding closure with these cases. In the United States, she focused on identity recovery, as she was particularly interested in the causes and effects of, for example, a murder case. That is where her passion for IT and security came about.

Back in South Africa, she discovered that she was very interested in the research aspect of things, not wanting to conclude without information that supports the particular argument. Consequently, she decided to do her PhD. Her research was based on the solution side of research. She was excited about the aspect of IT coding. The fraud of certificates had a long-term impact—where people claimed to be qualified while not qualified—and took the country’s economy down. As Myeza pointed out, she could not say that staff were the cause of these academic crimes unless research was conducted to provide substantiating facts.

When you do research, it is always important to tap into something very exciting because that will carry you through the hard times. It is never easy to do a PhD. She started working on a previous PhD (also in information systems and technology) and lasted for one year as she lost her mother during her studies and decided to take a break. Mourning for her mom made her stronger and kept her going, and after her loss she wanted to focus her energy on something that would bring positive results.

She remarked that the supervisors can have a huge impact on the quality of your thesis, and added that both her supervisors were good people, complementing each other. The three of them worked in a synchronised way, with respect. While her coding was very much based on HTML, her supervisors’ coding was based on algorithms. She said that although it was not always easy to get work back with many red remarks, it surely helped to have a very encouraging supervisor. She thinks a supervisor with wisdom, understanding, and experience makes a tremendous difference in a student’s life when they encourage you and help you to overcome obstacles in your studies.

A common weakness is that students tend to think they know what the answer should be. The question is why you would do research when the answer is already there. You are sitting with assumptions and not the honest answer. The difficulty is when you think you know the answer and it ends up not being the true answer as it relies on analysis and data to establish a particular conclusion.

An academic challenge Myeza had to overcome was finding articles to source information. The biggest challenge was how vast information is—where to start and how to sift in order to be left with the most relevant articles. One can get very lost in the process as the Internet has made things extremely wide and open, which is the part that used to drain her. It is frustrating to realise that you will never be able to cover everything. Certainly, you do not want to find, after spending time doing your research, that it has already been done by somebody else, either.

To Myeza the most exciting part of her studies comprised the mixed methods and when she had to start analysing her results. The second part entailed the coding of the actual certificates. You take a certificate when the student graduates and then scan it for security purposes, also adding an algorithm to the picture. Still, people will not be able to see that there is a code embedded through algorithms. This type of coding makes hackers bypass the information because it is not apparent to the eye.

Sometimes when people leave their countries as refugees and are educated, they cannot, for instance, apply for a work permit because their documents have been burnt. This is where the storage of the certificates becomes important—as refugees would have their qualifications verified. In most cases, a lost certificate cannot be replaced because the signatories of the certificates may no longer be available.

The coding of certificates would benefit students worldwide if there were a shared system to capture the qualifications, but currently we rely on individual institutions to verify qualifications. All institutions would have to be part of this system as the coding must be done immediately when the scanning occurs—before the certificates are archived—for such a system to work effectively. Every university would have to adopt this system and use the certificates in a depository which a code can open. At this stage, this system is being patented at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Myeza wishes she could have changed PhDs into action research—she feels that the world needs action rather than theory. She was very much into action design rather than theory, but she realised halfway through her studies that these are not popular theories and therefore they are not supported. The advantage to these theories, however, is that they tackle everyday life issues. They are there to find solutions. A PhD is a philosophy for a reason, so you are just going to have to study the past theories.

Myeza said her home is a sanctuary place and personally, she does not like working from home; that working from home is not conducive to mental health. There is no cut-off time in office hours, and often you forget about lunch and you work after regular office hours. However, when you weigh the positives and the negatives of working from home, there are more positives.

She foresees the issues of the Covid aftermath affecting many people. One can always take things one step at a time, be alert about these things, bring health and wellness into this, and find a way to meditate and deal with these matters.

The biggest lesson she learned from Covid was through the management course she did at Harvard. It came in handy when the pandemic started. She learned how quickly you need to learn in a leadership position and how fast you must react—and that is what Harvard calls true leadership. She was taught that leadership was not asking why; it is always having to say how you are going to do something. That is the greatest lesson she learnt.

Myeza took up her position at Unisa KZN on 1 February 2020, while the staff strike was on, and she could not meet people. Shortly after that, the Covid pandemic started. What was interesting for her was that her Harvard course allowed her to show if she is a leader. There is nothing to complain about and everything to be excited about. She was so happy when her manager said he was very thankful for how she hit the ground running and not complaining. The leadership course taught her how to be excited about the growth opportunities rather than complain about why things are happening this way. She felt very comfortable. The excitement comes when there are challenges. Once a job does not challenge her, she knows the way out. Despite some of the challenges she had to face when she started working in Durban, she is here to perform—and she feels that she is capable. She knows as the captain of the ship she needs to sail through and steer the ship in the right direction.

If she were not in tertiary education, Myeza would have been with the South African Police Service as an investigator to get to the bottom of cases. She enjoys reading. Her other passion is gardening—she loves sowing plants and watching them grow, and she has various vegetable plants. She also loves cooking as a way of relaxing. Myeza likes spicy food, and she follows different cooking pages, which inspire her to test out recipes. She enjoys nature, the sea, plants, and anything that brings her joy and inner peace.

*By Jo Cossavella, Communication Officer, KwaZulu-Natal Region