Watching Kader Asmal deliver his pronouncement last December on the now ex-ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe got me to thinking about the vicissitudes of power in South African politics. It is all well and good that mechanisms such as the national disciplinary committee exist in order to curtail excess, but there was something embarrassingly slimy about the whole process.
The image of Prof Asmal, former mainstay of education matters and defender of the pedagogical faith, subjected to lines like: “I thought you were a real Xhosa girl. How can you say no to your chief whip as if I am an ordinary man.” I mean, really. Dapper, refined and well groomed, Asmal is like an upmarket version of the Cell C number portability characters. And to think of him sullied by Goniwe’s bedtime pick-up lines offends the moral order.
On closer reflection, it seems that his current role is demeaning only in proportion to the muscle that Asmal wielded as minister of education. At the height of his powers, he was the scourge of his minions. And with each new version of future events — “Give Fort Hare to Rhodes … and Mangosuthu Tech to DIT, no wait …” — vice-chancellors would scatter for back-room deals or end up transfixed, like bunnies in the headlights of the prof’s transformation agenda. His total onslaught even extended beyond the mergers to a raft of policy acronyms, which have, since his fall from grace, slid quietly off into policy purgatory — that place where big ideas go when everyone starts to realise that they were not such good ideas after all, or impossible to implement (a bit like mergers, actually), or both.
From the moment of her induction into the position of minister, Naledi Pandor has been kept extremely busy restructuring the chaos of the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges and trying to get the much-touted Dinaledi schools off the ground. From the outset she informed higher education that her task is one of bedding down the mergers and tweaking the system where necessary. We have moved from the haphazard visionary to the über-housekeeper. But, in the process, a certain sado-masochistic quality in the engagement between the department and higher education has been lost.
The only attempt to resuscitate the good old blunderbuss days of Kader was in the prospect of enrolment capping, back in 2005. But, even here, the original gambit has been diluted over time, and in the present form is a gentle negotiation — over milk and cookies no doubt — between the department and individual institutions.
Reading between the lines, this “clipping rather than capping” is in large part because of the small problem that restricting the number of students entering the system flies in the face of Asgisa and the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition. The 1Â 000 more engineering graduates a year, the radical ramping-up in tourism, business process outsourcing (30Â 000 entry-level skills), 5Â 000 supervisory and managerial levels and the high skill needs in biofuels, not to mention the FET dilemma of producing 50Â 000 artisans by 2010 — these targets are not possible if one takes the deparment seriously.
I would humbly like to suggest a solution. If higher education is being called on to be all things to all departments (and here I’m not even factoring in the gripes from business about curricula mismatch), it seems to me that we need a dedicated department of higher education. Including the already heady mix of universities, universities of technology and comprehensives, it would also include the FET colleges and think through the aligning role that sector education and training authorities need to play.
This arrangement is accepted practice in countries where skill acceleration is an agreed national priority and has the benefit of a far more nuanced utilisation of higher education’s strengths. An enduring irony of apartheid’s approach to higher education is that, even with the mergers, we have 23 institutions that adequately cover the entire country, rural and urban. A department of higher education would provide a mechanism by which these institutions could develop unique offerings in line with their missions and built around nodes of excellence within the university.
No more hierarchy between pure and applied research, no more binary divide, no more big six and the rest — just institutions collaborating with a new department to become the best they can be. Even though the mergers might not have worked, with a new structure and a new commitment from the sector, the transformation of higher education is a real possibility. Just think how happy that would make the chairperson of the national disciplinary committee.